Feed, M.T. Anderson: I don’t read post-apocalyptic sci-fi anymore, and certainly not immediately-pre-apocalyptic, but I didn’t know that’s what this was. All I knew was that it was about a future in which everyone has the internet in their brain and they’re advertised to all the time, and that it’s extremely popular and draped with awards. It turned out to be about that, yes, but also about America’s not-so-distant precipitous decline into environmental apocalypse, masked by complete self-absorption and consumerist anesthetization. (How’s that for a pretentious book-review sentence?) It is, as far as I’m concerned, a horror novel, of the kind that terrifies me most. It is excellent and it will stay with you and horrify you whenever you notice yourself succumbing to your own consumerist anesthetization. If you want Uglies only without the hopeful uplift, this is the book for you! (Note for people who haven’t read it, the Uglies trilogy is wonderful, but it has hopeful uplift sort of the way Fahrenheit 451 does.)
Feed claims this is a Mayan “spell to preserve dying cultures”: “Spirit of the sky, spirit of the earth, grant us descendents for as long as the sun moves, for as long as there is dawn. Grant us green roads; grant us many green paths. May the people be peaceful, very peaceful, and let them not fall; let them not be wounded. Let there be no disgrace, no captivity. O thou Shrouded Glory, Lightning Lord, Lord Jaguar, Mount of Fire, Womb of Heaven, Womb of Earth. Let our people always have days, always have dawns.” Amen.
Zel, Donna Jo Napoli: I’d never read any Napoli, which is odd considering how much I love fairy tale retellings. I picked this more or less at random from my library’s holdings. It is, as you can perhaps tell from the title, a retelling of Rapunzel, set in 16th-century Switzerland. It’s lovely, but somewhat slow. And it has the same problem I usually have with fairy tales, that my favorite retellings solve by making the characters real people: I never believe in love at first sight. I believe in possibility-of-love at first sight, and then a relationship growing. Anyway, I was rather disappointed with this. Are there better Napolis I should read, or should I flee back to the arms of Robin McKinley?
0 responses so far ↓
1 ruthling // Apr 23, 2007 at 4:48 pm
I’ve never read any of Donna Jo Napoli’s work, but I knew her name sounded familiar. She is and was when I was there, a prof at Swarthmore, and very highly regarded.
Feed sounds like a very nasty sort of novel.
2 jadelennox // Apr 23, 2007 at 5:17 pm
I quite like The Magic Circle, though I think it works better if you don’t know which fairy tale it is going in (which means don’t read the backmatter).
3 colorwheel // Apr 23, 2007 at 6:07 pm
i love napoli’s Bound.
4 Jeff // Apr 23, 2007 at 9:22 pm
I wasn’t all that impressed by Feed. It seemed a little too heavy-handed for me; on the one hand you have a “consumer culture” of teenaged sheep, and on the other you have the professor and (to a lesser extent) his daughter as part of the “enlightened” culture. It’s 1984 as written by Adbusters.
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