Audiobook Review: Feed by Mira Grant

Feed (The Newsflesh Trilogy, Book 1) by Mira Grant
Read By Paula Christensen and Jesse Berntein

Hachette Audio

My mom used to tell me that there were two things you should never talk at the dinner table, politics and zombies. OK, that’s not really true, but if said mother declares such fictional restrictions on dinner time conversation, then Mira Grant’s Zombipolithriller Feed would not be open to discussion between bites of meatloaf.

Which is too darn bad for that fictional situation, because Feed is a fun thriller. Unlike many Zombie books, Feed looks at what our world would look like decades after the Zombie uprising. We witness this world through the eyes of two bloggers, Georgia and Shaun Mason, who are tapped as part of the press coverage following a Republican Presidential Candidate.

Mira Grant gives us an interesting take on the zombie world, without the focus being on blood and gore (although there is plenty of said blood and gore) we examine how the basic freedoms of our country would be altered willingly or unwillingly when the dead rise. Grant adds some twists to the zombie tropes that are unique to the genre, while still paying homage to Romero’s flesh eating shamblers.

All in all, Grant’s novel does what good zombie novels do. Using the undead as a mirror to ourselves, allowing us to decide what truly is human. She shows how sometimes it’s not the monsters hiding in the shadows we need to be afraid of, but the well dressed, handsome man shining in from our TV sets telling us what we think we want to hear. She accomplishes all this, while still giving us thrilling chases, zombie outbreaks, political intrigue, and a bunch of twists I didn’t see coming.

As far as the narration for the book went, I had mixed feelings. I really liked Paula Christensen’s voice for Georgia, but at points she has a bit of a distracting lisp that I think would become annoying to some people. It is most glaring in the beginning of the reading, and becomes less noticeable as the book progresses. Jesse Berstein handles some of the narration, particularly that of the male POV, and it was serviceable, but I think a bit distracting as well. I think Christensen’s male voices were pretty good for a female narrator, and the few changes in POV could have been handled by her without hurting the overall production.

Grade: B+