Aaron reviewed Feed by Mira Grant
Review of 'Feed' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Content warning Includes Spoilers
Although I'm a huge zombie fan, something did not sit right with me about this book. It's definitely entertaining, the world building is excellent. But the characterisation is a little off, it feels a bit too simple. Characters are defined by a small number of attributes, and they are not really explored. Shaun IS impulsive, cocky and annoying and there is no sense of a deeper personality there, even when we get to see the world through his eyes I didn't find anything more to attract me to him. George, similarly is a young woman who hates to be touched, has a problem with her eyes, and crazy obsession with describing security procedures in painfully minute detail.
Also, you can briefly hang a lightshade on how creepy their relationship might seem, but that doesn't make it not seem creepy. ("Creepy" is the wrong word here... But I don't want to get into this too much)
However my main issue with this book is the end, which I will now totally give away for those of you who haven't read the book, but still clicked through the spoiler lock...
I have always found the death of a first person narrative character to annoy the hell out me. Part of the buy in (for me) for reading a book in first person is that the person is actually recounting the events. Of course they are doing it in far more detail than someone really could (without embellishing a lot) but the point is that this imagined interaction is always sitting in the back of my mind. George is there with me (in all her two dimensional glory) recounting the events of this crazy adventure she had when she was young.
Then she tells me how she died.
And the whole setup gets jolted out of whack. The fact that I'm reading a work of fiction becomes immediately and strongly apparent, and I am completely taken out the story. It annoyed me so much that I couldn't read the final part of the book for a couple of days.
I know this is a personal thing, I love sudden character death (when done right) but this broke the book for me. Well, that and the fact that spending a whole book inside Shaun's head, while receiving advice from his imaginary dead half-sister (that's really going to help the creepiness) does not appeal at all.
But otherwise, it was alright.