Author: M.T. Anderson
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Genre: YA (science fiction)
Why I read it/how I found it: One of the books I could read for my writing for adolescent's class.
Description:
Identity crises, consumerism, and star-crossed teenage love in a futuristic society where people connect to the Internet via feeds implanted in their brains.
For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires.
Review:
This book is, to me, an exaggeration of what consumerism and our technology could potentially do. I recognize it as an exaggeration, but at the same time, even slipping a little bit into this society that no longer cares for the planet or anything else but their new toys. In that way, it was very thought-provoking and made me look at our own society. It's very compelling in that way. I loved Violet's character, she was so vibrant and a breath of relief with the other characters who were...well, let's just say a lot like the people I didn't care for in high school. However, I didn't like Titus. He was pretty cool in the middle with Violet, but at the beginning and the end I didn't like him. There's one point where I really hated him. In this futuristic world, there's a lot of new jargon. "Meg," "unit," "mal," just to name a few. I had no flipping idea what a lot of those words were used for. I still don't know what "unit" is. When going into slang terms not known to the readers, we need some clues, but I didn't pick up on them. Not like with Scott Westerfield's Uglies. And rest of the language--so annoying. I get that he wanted to show how low society had sunk to have "like" and "was all" for dialogue tags, but when it gets distracting and annoying to the reader, it's not a good thing to use. I felt like I couldn't inject myself in the world at the beginning. In the middle and end it lightens out, so after the first thirty or forty pages it's fine. But those first few made me annoyed--and I'm from California, I use those phrases all the time when I'm telling a story.
Other information: M.T. Anderson's website is here.
That sounds like it would be interesting, but at the same time a little confusing and if you don't like the main character for big chunks of the book, hard to enjoy. Violet sounds like a cool character though. :)
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a fantastic premise that might have been let down a bit by the execution. I'm intrigued enough to give it a try though :-)
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like an interesting read. I think I'll add it to my TBR list. It would be different from my regular reads, but I always like a change. Glad you shared :)
ReplyDeletegreat review, very honest but fair. I'll have to check this one out.
ReplyDeleteI've heard of this book. Thanks for the review. :)
ReplyDeleteOh, and hi from the campaign trail.