Back in January of 2006 I reviewed for The Mountain Yodeler a completely different and very goofy book by M.T. Anderson, Whales on Stilts.  M.T. Anderson is one of those amazing authors who can write anything from sophomoric humor, through deep historical fiction (The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing), into mind-bendingly futuristic sci fi.  And he does it all extremely well.

Feed represents the mind-bending sci fi.  It tells of a future where nearly everybody has a direct link installed into their brain at birth.  This “feed” links them to something like the World Wide Web, only more.

People are constantly fed sitcoms, commercials, and facts that one might otherwise have to remember for a test.  Walking through a mall (or anywhere things are for sale) people are “bannered” by the different products, sometimes to the point where they can’t even talk to the real people around them. 

The result of all this instant knowledge is that the teens in this story have lost much of their ability or desire to think for themselves.  They’re too busy trying desperately to have all the fun that the feed keeps telling them is out there. 

Titus and his friends head for the moon for spring break and end up at a party.  They chat among themselves, relying heavily on phrases such as, “I was going like,…”, “I’m so null,” “He was like,…”, and a few choice words well-known to teens today.

They can also instant message each other without moving a finger, no cell phones required.  So, they have private chats in the middle of public conversations, talking behind each other’s backs right there in front of their faces!

In the midst of the party, the girls are notified via their feed that hairstyles have changed, so they head off to the bathroom for an update.  One cannot be left behind by fashion! 

In fact, the skin lesions everyone is developing are turning into fashion statements, too.  The more you have the more stylish you are, so people fake extra lesions in the name of beauty.

Titus, however, is not finding everything to be as much “goldy and sparkling” fun as billed by all the commercials coming through his feed.  Maybe that’s why he’s intrigued by a girl he meets at the party who’s not like everybody else.  A girl who doesn’t (maybe can’t) let the feed take total control of her mind.

Titus’s relationship with this girl forces him to face some realities about the feed and the risks it entails.  But it’s a lot for one guy to wrap his electronically-bombarded head around.

Feed presents a future amazingly close to our own present.  Scientists are right now able to put implants into the brain of a patient with a missing arm, allowing her to control her prosthetic arm with thoughts.  That’s cool!  A person can be made wholly functional again.

Other scientists have put probes into a rat’s brain, enabling anybody with the controller to tell the rat which way to go.  That’s scary.  A living thing can be made into a robot.

In Feed, M.T. Anderson has given us a satirical world in which to explore where we might be headed.  By thinking ahead (and remembering to think always) maybe we can progress to a better world than the one Anderson has shown us.  I think we can.

Feed is suggested for ages 14 and older.

Happy reading!!  And happy thinking!

Do you ever wish reading a book was more like watching a movie?  If so, The Invention of Hugo Cabret might be just your kind of book.  (I originally wrote this review in January of 2008, and now they have created a movie from it called Hugo, coming out this Thanksgiving!)

As author Brian Selznick himself describes it, Hugo Cabret is “not exactly a novel, not quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a movie, but a combination of all these things.” 

There are 544 pages, more than half of which are fabulously detailed, full-page charcoal drawings.  Moreover, the drawings don’t just show what the words have already told, they pull the story forward in their own right, like snippets of silent film.

Hugo is a 12-year-old orphan boy living in the walls of a Paris train station at the turn of the 20th century.  He moves around behind the scenes, winding and fixing all the clocks in the station, a job that used to belong to his uncle before the man disappeared.  Hugo must scrounge or steal what he needs to survive, since he can’t cash his missing uncle’s paychecks.

Hugo’s only possessions are two things his father left him when he died – a notebook full of sketches, and an obsession to fix the broken automaton detailed in those sketches.  The automaton is a metal man hunched over a desk with pen in hand, and Hugo is sure that the message the machine’s gears were programmed to write would be profound and life-changing, if only the man to write again.

When the museum where the automaton is housed burns down, Hugo drags what’s left of the machine back to the train station.  In an effort to fix it, he studies his father’s notebook and steals gears and parts from the cranky old man who runs the toy store.

This story is an intricately meshed web of history and fiction.  Hugo Cabret brings together Selznicks’s fascination with the real-life father of science fiction movies, Georges Méliès, the filmmaker’s collection of automatons, and Selznick’s own knack for telling stories through pictures.

There are several great videos on Amazon including movie trailers and an interview with Selznick.  In the interview Selznick describes the history of his book, and the research he did in order to get the details just right, and includes a few samples of the book’s illustrations. 

This 2008 Caldecott Medal winner is suggested for kids 9-12, and is available at the Lancaster branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.  But don’t let that stop you from buying The Invention of Hugo Cabret or any other book.  Support your favorite author, and with any luck they’ll be able to keep writing great stories for us!

Happy Reading!