Royal Reviews: Feed by Mira Grant

Title: Feed (Newsflesh #1)
Author: Mira Grant:
Publisher: Orbit
ISBN: 0316081051
Release Date: May 2010
Rating: 3.5 Crowns

In 2014, two experimental viruses--a genetically engineered flu strained designed by Dr. Alexander Kellis, intended to as a cure for the common cold, and a cancer-killing strain of Marburg, known as “Marburg Amberlee”--escaped the lab and combined to form a single airborne pathogen that swept around the world in a matter of days. It cured cancer. It stopped a thousand cold and flu viruses in their tracks.

It raised the dead.

Millions died in the chaos that followed. The summer of 2014 was dubbed “The Rising”, and only the lessons learned from a thousand zombie movies allowed mankind to survive. Even then, the world was changed forever. The mainstream media fell, Internet news acquired an undeniable new legitimacy, and the CDC rose to a new level of power.

Set twenty years after the Rising, the Newsflesh trilogy follows a team of bloggers, led by Georgia and Shaun Mason, as they search for the brutal truths behind the infection. Danger, deceit, and betrayal lurk around every corner, as does the hardest question of them all:

When will you rise?

Thoughts:

I was craving a zombie book, after coming down from the high of Max Brook’s World War Z. I would highly recommend this book to book bloggers, Georgia and Shaun Mason are bloggers themselves! Obviously zombies are the news in this sort of post-apocalyptic world. At the beginning of every chapter we find a piece of their minds through their blogs, I really liked this form of story telling. Unfortunately, I was craving action, zombie chases, zombies going “arrrgg” at you through the page, and in that regard the book didn’t deliver for me. There are a couple of zombie attacks, and I can honestly say that the prologue is on of the best I’ve read and hooked me immediately. I think Grant’s take on zombies is novel (to me at least, I’m still a zombie literature newbie). She creates this story where the Kellis-Amberlee disease (which is what turns people into zombies) is used as a form of terrorism.

The story is interesting, and it deals more with journalism and political issues of this new form of terrorism. It’s an interesting take, and it’s a good read, just know that it’s not your typical zombie book. I also liked how Grant created her own mythology when it came to zombies, I was used to you regular getting nobody-really-knows-where-the-first-zombie-came-from explanation, and to me her take on the combination of two experimental viruses was refreshing and somewhat even more frightening because it sounds completely reasonable and something that could actually happen!