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. Following in the footsteps of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr., M. T. Anderson has created a not-so-brave new world -- and a smart, savage satire that has captivated readers with its view of an imagined future that veers unnervingly close to the here and now.
I picked up this book because it had some good buzz in sci-fi circles (it even won a Golden Duck in 2003). This book has a very interesting premise: in a world where everyone has a computer embedded in their head with a constant link to the internet (called a "feed", thus the title) one boy is attacked by a hacker and left questioning all his assumptions about the world. The premise was good, but the plot seemed kinda laggy. It's almost as if the author really wanted to write from the perspective of the girlfriend but either couldn't write a believable girl's voice or wanted the chance to preach at us through the main character. Either way the book was good, but draggy in places and very obvious and abrupt in its ending. It's probably not as thought-provoking as the author wishes, too. It seems like one of those books that would be popular in a high school because the teacher can easily lead uninterested students to talking about the book's message, but not absorbing enough to make them actually care :( I'd say the book is worth a read for completionists in YA Sci Fi, but not as fluff leisure material.
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