Review Detail

Reader reviewed by Brenda

Titus and his friends are typical middle class teens sometime in the far future. They go to School (TM) which is owned by the big corporations. But mostly they listen to their feed, a smart Internet connection directly connected into their brains. The feed knows what they like, it knows what they want and it knows the coolest thing of the moment. The feed markets products to them constantly and also allows them to have private chats with anyone else any time. Then one night Titus meets Violet, a girl a little off the grid. She didn't get a feed until she was 7 and mistrusts the marketing. Amusingly, her father is a professor of dead languages, like Fortran and Basic. Then one night a hacker protester infects their feeds and they learn
something about life without the feed.

This book reminded me a lot of Fahrenheit 451, where a guy who totally buys into the system meets a girl who doesn't and it changes his life. However there's no burning of books in this book. It's more about how the constant chase of what's cool can cover up deeper problems in a society.

Much of the book is in a future teen jargon, but it's easy to figure out once you get used to it. I like books about alternate societies so I enjoyed this book, but I think it could have had a little more to say. The language is lovely, also like Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451