A review by dresswaltz
Feed, by Mira Grant
4.0
Apparently for my spooky month this year, it's all zombies--playing (and replaying in some cases) the newer Resident Evil games, finishing up the iZombie TV show, and reading the Newsflesh series.
I don't like writing reviews; I prefer to just exchange thoughts directly with friends. I don't like how permanent things on the internet are, I guess (after all, I change, so my thoughts are likely to as well). But I don't know of any friends that have read this book, so I went to check the reviews and find others' thoughts--and was surprised at how highly Liked so many negative reviews were. And over some really inconsequential things, too.
Like how the main character isn't into sex, which some claimed made her/the author juvenile ("icky no sex!")--y'all, ace people exist lol. Other people in the book have sex, just not the main character. Grant/McGuire's main characters in other books have sex! Is a book lesser because it doesn't have sex? Those are your preferences, but it's a weird ding. I saw someone else was mad at how the specifics of firearms are used in this book--which, I mean, there are guns in this book, but it's so far from the focus that it seems like another weird thing to be upset over. But I guess that's just the crux of it: A lot of zombie media focuses on the immediate outbreak and the action. Which is fine sometimes, but I appreciate it when another angle is used. In this case, the outbreak happened a couple decades or more ago, and it's more about epidemiology and how humans restructure society around a pandemic than it is about the zombies themselves--something that certainly hits different in 2021.
So to any friends reading (or anyone else really): This isn't a zombie action book. This is a book that has zombies...and is concerned about corruption in news media, and politics, and epidemiology, and how humans make a new normal in extreme circumstances. The villain is a little obvious, and the writing is not her absolute best (this is one of her first novels after all), but I was hooked on the worldbuilding and characters and very much want to find out what happens next.
I don't like writing reviews; I prefer to just exchange thoughts directly with friends. I don't like how permanent things on the internet are, I guess (after all, I change, so my thoughts are likely to as well). But I don't know of any friends that have read this book, so I went to check the reviews and find others' thoughts--and was surprised at how highly Liked so many negative reviews were. And over some really inconsequential things, too.
Like how the main character isn't into sex, which some claimed made her/the author juvenile ("icky no sex!")--y'all, ace people exist lol. Other people in the book have sex, just not the main character. Grant/McGuire's main characters in other books have sex! Is a book lesser because it doesn't have sex? Those are your preferences, but it's a weird ding. I saw someone else was mad at how the specifics of firearms are used in this book--which, I mean, there are guns in this book, but it's so far from the focus that it seems like another weird thing to be upset over. But I guess that's just the crux of it: A lot of zombie media focuses on the immediate outbreak and the action. Which is fine sometimes, but I appreciate it when another angle is used. In this case, the outbreak happened a couple decades or more ago, and it's more about epidemiology and how humans restructure society around a pandemic than it is about the zombies themselves--something that certainly hits different in 2021.
So to any friends reading (or anyone else really): This isn't a zombie action book. This is a book that has zombies...and is concerned about corruption in news media, and politics, and epidemiology, and how humans make a new normal in extreme circumstances. The villain is a little obvious, and the writing is not her absolute best (this is one of her first novels after all), but I was hooked on the worldbuilding and characters and very much want to find out what happens next.