Feed (Newsflesh Book 1) by Mira Grant (Epub)

Description

The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beat the common cold. But in doing so we created something new, something terrible that no one could stop. The infection spread, virus blocks taking over bodies and minds with one, unstoppable command: FEED.

Now, twenty years after the Rising, Georgia and Shaun Mason are on the trail of the biggest story of their lives—the dark conspiracy behind the infected. The truth will out, even if it kills them.

User’s Reviews

From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Urban fantasist Seanan McGuire (Rosemary and Rue) picks up a new pen name for this gripping, thrilling, and brutal depiction of a postapocalyptic 2039. Twin bloggers Georgia and Shaun Mason and their colleague Buffy are thrilled when Sen. Peter Ryman, the first presidential candidate to come of age since social media saved the world from a virus that reanimates the dead, invites them to cover his campaign. Then an event is attacked by zombies, and Ryman’s daughter is killed. As the bloggers wield the newfound power of new media, they tangle with the CDC, a scheming vice presidential candidate, and mysterious conspirators who want more than the Oval Office. Shunning misogynistic horror tropes in favor of genuine drama and pure creepiness, McGuire has crafted a masterpiece of suspense with engaging, appealing characters who conduct a soul-shredding examination of what’s true and what’s reported. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the mass_market edition.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ Don’t waste your time on this. Go read Black Tide Rising or Monster Hunters International. Pride and Prejudice. Moby Dick. Anything. You’ll thank me, and all the other people who have appropriately reviewed this horrible novel at the one star it earned.Bad mechanics. Stupid politics. Poor plot. Unbelievable cliched bad guys (oh, this writer does NOT like Christians, hoo boy). It’s a zombie novel that comes off anti-gun, but in which the characters carry and use guns, including the climax (darned monster of a Christian gets their just deserts).It’s a shame because the set up was interesting. The characters and world building had quite a lot going for it. However, the writers lack of understanding of basic physics and the world outside of Berkeley California combined with a clear and abiding loathing for Christianity (hey, I’m not Christian, but the degree of vitriol in this book was impossible to ignore), the United States and the US Military completely destroyed what they set out to do.

⭐ Zombies. From about the turn of the century, zombies have been everywhere, in books, television shows, movies, and video games.Feed features zombies, too. But it takes a fresh approach. Instead of being focused on the initial outbreak of zombie-ism or its immediate aftermath, the story is set about 15 years later. This allows the author to imagine the changes to American society due to the threat of zombies. As demonstrated in her other works (like Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day and Every Heart a Doorway), the author is very good at worldbuilding. Her “post-zombie” America is an interesting environment that was fun to explore for a while.The book is not, however, an exercise in pure speculative worldbuilding. The plot follows a team of bloggers embedded with a presidential campaign. There’s drama and action. It’s all very tense and emotional, featuring a smart, strong female lead, her more extroverted and action-oriented brother, and a pretty, religious, hippy techie female sidekick. I got some dust in my eyes while I read it. There was some talk that it should have won some major awards the year it came out, and I can kinda see why.I had a few problems with the book that prevented me from giving it a 5-star review. There’s a mystery in the book that ain’t all that mysterious. An average Scooby-Doo episode is less obvious than this book as to the identity of the Bad Guy. He/She might as well be twirling a mustache. And for a book about following around a presidential candidate, the political analyses, viewpoints, and world building is really simplistic and not realistic. I know it’s weird to critique a book with zombies for a lack of realism, but whatever, the book appears to aim high to have something “meaningful to say about the now.” I think it’s only fair to say that ambition wasn’t quite achieved to its fullest potential. The book is also a little heavy-handed and on-the-nose. It’s not SO much a zombie action/adventure novel as a kind of All the President’s Men that champions the pluck of New Media Blogging as a method of uncovering the conspiracies against Americans. The zombie stuff is pretty much a metaphor for the fears of the people – of disease, of terrorism, of the Other – that have always frightened Americans. It’s a cool idea, but instead of the clean, clever zombie-as-consumer of Romero, it comes off sort of clumsily.But all of that is criticism from my brain juices. My heart fell hard for the main character and her brother. I liked reading about their adventures. The book made me laugh. It made me sad. It made me think. It made me squirm (so many blood tests!). I don’t know that I’ll continue the series, but I am glad that I visited that world for a little while. If you like zombie stuff, you should consider a visit, too.

⭐ This book has zombies in it, and journalists. But it’s not a zombie book. (I don’t care for zombie books, other than “World War Z.” They’re just not my monster of choice.)”Feed” is a political thriller about the internet and journalism, and the intersection among the three. The title is a play on words. Feed, obviously, is what zombies do. But journalists also count on a regular news feed to keep them informed about the larger world. And on the internet, an RSS feed is one way Joe Average can keep track of an overflow of information.Siblings Georgia and Shaun Mason and their friend Buffy run a website called “After the End Times.” Georgia is a Newsie – basically a real reporter, who uses video feeds and writing to try and keep her readers informed. Shaun is an Irwin, whose job is to “go out and harass danger to give the housebound readers/viewers a thrill.” (It’s named after Steve Irwin, which is a nice touch.) Buffy is a Fictional, who provides stories, poetry, ongoing novels and other fiction content to the website. She’s also their primary tech geek. They also have a “staff” located all over the world, which helps keep the website active and ever-changing.In search of higher ratings for their website, the trio apply for and win the opportunity to provide coverage of the campaign trail for a Senator who is running for President. And that’s where all the excitement starts. Do zombies play a part? Yes, indeed, they do.But “Feed” is about much more than zombies. It’s about love and ambition and betrayal. It’s about how the drive for higher ratings and thus more paying advertisers shapes how the news is reported. It’s about politics and the compromises made in the interest of winning a campaign. And ultimately it’s about even larger questions, like who would want to keep the living populace of the country terrified, and why?Is it a perfect novel? No. Grant has done her research and in the interest of promoting a viable accuracy, she sometimes goes on a little too long on the technical aspects of internet journalism, virology and epidemiology. “Feed” is also, it turns out, the first book in a trilogy. Although I found “Feed” perfectly satisfying as a stand-alone story, I’ll absolutely be looking to read the other two books.Highly recommended for people who enjoy journalism, pondering the future of journalism, politics, thrillers… oh, and zombies.

⭐ This book begins with a good concept, but it stumbled too frequently in execution.Georgia and her brother Shaun are young journalists in a world where zombies are an accepted fact of life and the most reliable and cutting-edge journalism is coming from blogs. The siblings run their own up-and-coming blog and their career is poised for a boost when a major presidential candidate selects them to receive intimate access to his campaign and family.The world-building is intricate and that’s . . . well, that’s part of the problem. Grant can’t get out of her own way with all the technical details of her world and it becomes extremely repetitive. She’s never content to tell us something just once, we get the same pieces of information over and over again. I wish she had trusted her readers to retain information from one chapter to the next. It’s further complicated by Georgia and Shaun providing all these details in first person and it’s unclear why they would be explaining what are basic facts of their life to us in such detail, especially when it requires them contrasting their world with the world that we current readers live in. As their entire life has taken place in the context of this zombie-filled world, it doesn’t make sense *why* they bother to explain their world in such detail and contrast it to the pre-zombie world.Georgia is constantly focusing on her role as an impartial and unbiased journalist which is what makes it confusing when her blog posts (presented as part of the story) directly contradict this. Things like this jarred me out of the story. There was also an issue of Grant’s world-building failing to address the question that interested me most — in the context of a zombie-decimated population, how are all these walls and air-dropped disinfectant sprays and high tech blood tests and special bleach-spray showers being paid for? Who is funding them? It all sounds very expensive and the economic aspect of the zombie outbreak is never addressed.

⭐ Hands down my favorite zombie story, because it’s honestly not about the zombies. Taking the genre “speculative fiction” seriously, Grant speculates not only on what exactly would get the zombie ball rolling, but moreso on what it would DO to our society after we find our new equilibrium. What will change in our lives? In technology? Medicine? Politics? Culture? That’s almost more fascinating than what makes people go all zombified, and THAT stuff is the best zombie explanation of anything I’ve read or seenAnd, uh, if you’re down for a little emotional trauma, she delivers it masterfully

⭐ While reading this, I kept thinking of the line in Jurassic Park where Jeff Goldblum says, “Now, there are going to be dinosaurs on this ride, right?” I thought there were going to be zombies in this book! The book OPENED with zombies, and then they disappeared for what seemed like hundreds of pages! I skimmed huge sections of the book, looking for zombie encounters. Even with so much skimming, the plot was straight forward and I didn’t lose anything. There is nothing subtle about who the bad guy is. In every scene there might as well be a label saying, “BAD GUY” with an arrow pointing to him! Eventually I got caught up in the plot and started reading the book. When it finally gets going, there’s no putting it down and I was up till the wee hours getting through the climax. I suspect there is a secondary bad guy, but I don’t think I’m going to read the next book to find out. There were whole long sections that were just boring. I think the book could have been cut by 200 pages and nothing would have suffered. What is good, however, is the author’s conception of a world in which a zombie plague occurred, but the government didn’t collapse. Instead, it dealt fairly successfully with it. So, there are not tiny pockets of survivors struggling to stay alive. In this world, there are plenty of survivors, with a twist. Everyone carries the virus which “amplifies” if there are too many people gathered in one place and creates an outbreak, Because of this, there are stringent security protocols in place everywhere and the protaginists are always having to out there hands in little boxes in which they are pricked with little needles to obtain blood samples which are analyzed while the box is still clamped to their hand. Antiseptic is sprayed on the pin pricks and, if the lights turn green, all is well and they are released. If all is not well, they are shot. Immediately. The relationship between the brother and sister is handled well, even to the point of them sharing hotel rooms because the only person they trust to have their back if an outbreak occurs is each other.So, final analysis? Mixed. Interesting world, very different concept than other writers in the genre. Zombie scenes are good, though few and far between. Characters are well-developed and believable. I’m sure anyone involved in journalism or blogging will enjoy it. It’s still a pretty good read. Just don’t start into the point in the plot where they go to the political convention in Sacramento unless you’re willing to commit yourself all the way through it, because that’s the point of no return!

⭐ Yeah, yeah, I know. Here I am, a self-proclaimed disdainer of zombies, reading another zombie book. Hey, I do like to stretch myself and explore genres and subject matters I’m not overly fond of. Tastes can change.I wasn’t overly impressed with this book. Don’t get me wrong, the writing is excellent, the structure and events are great, and I did like the characters. But in my opinion, based on my own interests and aesthetic, Feed just wasn’t quite worth the sum of its parts. It is NOT a bad book. It just didn’t grasp me the way some others have. I spoke to a friend who had also read it (he didn’t finish it), and I summed it up as this:The book entertained me, but it didn’t engage me.I felt one step too far back from the action. I loved the narrator, Georgia. I loved Shaun. I loved Buffy and Steve. But I was never one of them. I didn’t belong with the crew. I think another holdback for me on this was that it is politically centered, with the campaign, and I don’t care for politics much (if at all).I think the tastes for this book are a little more narrow than some, which isn’t bad. There is a great audience for this book. I just wasn’t part of it.

⭐ Feed is a satisfying read, and definitely worth the $5 I spent on it, and the time spent reading it. The characters are passably interesting, and the interactions between the siblings manage to make this book worth reading.The Bad Stuff:The book really could have had about a hundred pages knocked off it because Mira Grant feels the need to endlessly remind the reader of repetitive details. To say nothing of her frequent and boring discourses about how reporters are the saviors of humanity.Much of the science in this work is atrocious, and in places a simple wikipedia search can prove her assumptions wrong. (Blocking UV does not prevent pain to dilated pupils. Anyone who has turned the lights on in the middle of the night could tell you that.)The plot is predictable and perhaps even cliche to anyone paying attention, and Grant’s writing is perhaps not the best.Parts of the world imagined in the book were poorly imagined.The Good Stuff:The book managed to invest me in its characters, it takes place in an interesting and well imagined world. The world envisioned is one that reflects our own and has much to say about the way we view our world, in particularly how fear controls us as a society.If you’re a fan of popular culture as am I, I think you’ll love this book because she mostly seamlessly introduces numerous references to pop culture, some of which are artificial and forced, but many of them come off amusingly.

⭐ If there’s one thing I love, it’s a good zombie novel. However, I am not treading new ground when I say that the genre has been written, rewritten, and wrung out for every last bit of emotion. What I was pleasantly surprised to find in this novel was something I didn’t really think was possible: a genuinely new story. Although the concept of actually rebuilding a functioning, almost “normal” society isn’t totally unheard of in the genre (World War Z comes to mind), this is the first book I’ve read that authentically flushes out what it could actually look like. Add in futuristic technology, espionage, political intrigue, and interesting, engaging characters, and you have a book that stands apart from its peers.

⭐ As far as zombie books go, this one is quite good. At least I think it is, I haven’t read a lot in this genre.I like the zombies in this book because they make a lot more sense than the familiar living dead portrayed elsewhere. These almost make sense. The characters in the book are good, believable, and have unique personalities. The world is fairly well thought out and detailed. There’s a lot of action, most of which is a fun ride.There are a couple of things I didn’t like. I hate when people who are dying explain the reasons for their actions or tell the survivors some great secret that will push them to pursue a hopeless (ha!) cause. There are certain aspects of the story that don’t really make sense, and this is not necessary for the working of the plot. Lastly, the book leaves many things unresolved to try to prompt the reader to read the next book in the series. A good book doesn’t need that, the reader will love the characters and their world enough to continue without the lack of satisfaction of a good ending.

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