Feed: The Newsflesh Trilogy: Book 1

4,5+ stars that are worth being marked down as 5. Wow, I am spent. This is what a book should do to you and for you and just be. I am emotionally exhausted and don't mind at all admitting that I've now shed tears three times today as I hungrily (sorry for the pun) kept reading! Yes, a man in his mid-50s has been sitting here all day mourning the loss of a few kids in their late teens or 20s. Wow. OK, I must admit to a little surprise that the book had so much YA flavor to it but if there was ever a great zombie tale that captured all the real drama and emotion involved in such a world, this is it. This ranks easily to me with the great 'Girl With All the Gifts' duology and with the added suspense of such a well-crafted mystery to go along with it, in fact outpaced those books for me! And what makes it - I'm switching tenses too much here, I know - even more absolutely gut-wrenching is that even with the date stamps of 2040 (+/-) being put on so many reports and blog entries, this book is shockingly relevant to the world we live in today. I have no doubt that the religious right and the mob-like politicians in charge of too much of the so-called 'Free World of 2018' would act as equally without conscience against their fellow man in order to improve their political standing and profit margins. Name a name or pull up a headline and you can damn well see it in some of the despicable evil that crops up in this book - and no, that does not include the zombies! The parts that describe the importance of fear in terms of keeping our society from evolving could not be more true. I am also overjoyed that this book overcame most of what I found missing or even overbaked with the Parasite trilogy that I actually read first. Yes, Ms. 'Grant' does have a tendency to occasionally drift within various descriptives and seems to lose just a little bit of focus time and again (please get a new editor!!!) but in this case, the gaps or hiccups in either flow or just that plain state of not realizing I was reading a book were much less apparent than the aforementioned trilogy. Also, it was a relief to not have the actual cause of the initial outbreak constantly delved upon. It happened this way, thank you. Its here, this is what that means and get used to it. Well done! Now if you'll excuse me, I wish to get some well earned sleep so that I can devour - dang it, I did it again! - the next book in the series starting tomorrow!

Great world building and good plot. I loved it but it had its bad points: Had a bad habbit of explaining rather than showing and repeating things so many times you'd think it was a recap. Falls into thw annoying 'other girls do this, unlike me' trope too many times.

An interesting and unique take on the zombie genre. I like the originality of the story and it was reasonably well written but the focus on the characters being journalists was a little overdone and the blog entries sometimes seemed a little senseless and irritating. The writing style just didn't appeal to me but twenty somethings might like it.