BOOK REVIEW: The Feed by Nick Clark Windo

Format: ARC, NetGalley
Links: Amazon UK | Goodreads
Publisher: Headline
Publication date: 25th January 2018
Blurb:It makes us. It destroys us.

The Feed is everywhere. It can be accessed by anyone, at any time. Every interaction, every emotion, every image can be shared through it.

Tom and Kate use The Feed, but they have resisted addiction to it. And this will serve them well when The Feed collapses. Until their six-year-old daughter, Bea, goes missing.

Because how do you find someone in a world devoid of technology? And what happens when you can no longer trust that your loved ones are really who they claim to be?

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Review: The Feed is, to put it simply, an exceptionally elaborate and advanced form of social media. But instead of on an iPhone or a laptop, it’s all ingrained in your head and you can access anything, anyone and everything instantaneously. It’s addictive and life-altering and it’s gone so far that most humans can’t function without it. Then one day, it collapses and everyone is offline. Our main characters, Tom and Kate manage without it and find a way to survive with their daughter, Bea and a camp of others, adapting to the new ways of life that the collapse of The Feed has forced them into. Then one day, Bea goes missing and Tom and Kate head out on a truly treacherous mission to find her amongst a world of no technology, savages and threats far beyond our imagination.

Okay, just to put it out there, I have a lot of thoughts about this book. Some good but mostly bad / annoying. But bear with me. First of all, I loved the concept. I’m not opposed to a bit of Sci-Fi every now and again and being a bit of a social media addict myself, this concept sounded right up my street and I was instantly drawn in to it by the blurb and the cover. With very little information about what The Feed is at first, you’re going into the book with so many questions that anything is possible.

The book begins with a look of “Feed talk“. It’s all very rapid and almost like the language was trying to emulate what was going on in someone’s brain whilst using The Feed but I don’t now if it was the formatting of the copy I had on my Kindle but I had a few problems with this section (after this in the normal bulk of the story, the formatting was absolutely fine!). I noticed a few wording mistakes which shouldn’t have been there and on occasion, I felt like I was reading a sentence which was in the wrong part of the book which made no sense to the one that came before or after it. I don’t know if this was intentional but nevertheless, it was weird and kinda annoying.

Another huge problem I had which made me struggle with this book more than I would have otherwise was that there were no chapters just a few really long sections. No chapters is something I cannot stand. But that’s just a personal preference and something someone else might not be at all affected by.

But something kept me reading The Feed and I think it was the need to know more about this world they live in. It was very interesting and very unique and original. It had almost a Walking Dead vibe to it, after the collapse and roads were deserted and cars were upturned and houses were ransacked. I did find it very difficult to picture some of the settings, however. I loved the first part where Tom and Kate lived in their camp (an old farm house with land) with a few other people, including their daughter. It was a nice part of the book which, now having finished it, was like the calm before the storm. But everything after that big, the city and the buildings they were in, I found it very hard to imagine. In a way that, if this was turned into a movie, then it would look words apart from how I’m feebly attempting to imagine it in my head.

Thinking about it now, this book would actually make an amazing film or TV show!

One more niggle was that Kate was a desperately annoying and two dimensional character. I couldn’t tell you a single trait she had or something she loved (other than her daughter) or anything of substance. In fact, none of the characters I felt were particularly interesting or vibrant. Except Sylene who was intriguing – especially how she came to be in the story. I definitely feel, personally, that the writing was very much focused more on the settings a rather than the characters and the people and for me, I prefer it the other way around.

Enough moaning, I am very confused about this book because like I said, it kept me reading. I finished the last 15% in one sitting and I wanted to know more and what was going to happen next. Which is obviously what a book should do to the reader. But there were too many “little things” which irked me to give it a higher rating than I have. If the author wrote another book with a similarly interesting and unique idea, would I read it? Yes, probably. If they made this story into a film, would I watch it? Heck yes, definitely! If I could rate on originality and storyline then this wouldh ave got a 4.5 but I have to take everything else into consideration when rating a book. I certainly wouldn’t encourage people not to read it though because it has a lot of potential to be a very popular read next year when its released!