“There are two sides to every story…
The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beat the common cold. But in doing so we unleashed something horrifying and unstoppable. The infection spread leaving those afflicted with a single uncontrollable impulse: FEED.
Now, twenty years after the Rising, a team of scrappy underdog reporters relentlessly pursue the truth while competing against the superstar Masons, surrounded by the infected, and facing more insidious forces working in the shadows.”
Oh, I so wanted to like this book more than I did. I so wanted it to be a worthy addition to the Newsflesh universe. And oh, was I disappointed.
Don’t get me wrong–this isn’t a bad book. It has all the politics and rampaging zombies that you would expect from Grant’s post-apocalyptic setting. There were some memorable scenes included here, such as zombies used in an assassination attempt and two politicians meeting in a strip club. (Yes, you read that right.) I also appreciated that the author had such a diverse cast of characters, including a former stripper turned politician and a genderfluid member of the blogging team.
But alongside of that, Grant strayed into a certain amount of preaching. We as readers get descriptions of what it means to be genderfluid, the plight of strippers and sex workers, women’s rights, and several more. In a novel about a political campaign, some amount of such things are to be expected, but it happened often enough that I noticed and was pulled out of the story.
My biggest issue with this novel is that it was billed as being the other side of what happened in Feed, and to a small degree it is–if by “the other side” you mean the Democratic side of the campaign. What this book doesn’t do, however, is add anything to the original story. If you’ve read the Newsflesh trilogy, you won’t find anything here that is unfamiliar. If you read this one first, you don’t need to read the Newsflesh books, because all the revelations therein are spelled out for you here. The characters even make a point of noting that they know more than the Masons, the main characters of the trilogy. And all those revelations come at about the three-quarters mark in the story, and the rest of the novel is stuff that doesn’t advance the plot at all.
I guess that adding more material to the Newsflesh universe satisfies the fans, so that’s good, but this book really didn’t do anything for me. I thought it had more flaws than it had strong points.
This book was a personal purchase.
(Description nicked from Goodreads.com)