Feed by M. T. Anderson

1. Summary: Titus and his friends decide to head to the moon for a spring break trip. Visions of wild parties fill their minds, but instead, half the places they want to go are long gone. While at The Ricochet Lounge, Titus meets Violet, the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. After some initial jealousy by the girls in the group, Violet is welcomed into the crowd and they head to another club. Out of nowhere, an old man shows up and essentially hacks their feeds, which are internal, supercomputer, social media like functions that keep them surrounded and controlled by media. To fix their feeds, they must be turned off. This is a struggle for Titus because he is used to being constantly connected. Violet and Titus stay friends and she reveals that she didn’t receive her feed until she was 7 and that it is malfunctioning. This eventually leads to her becoming brain dead and despite Titus ditching her earlier, he essentially becomes her feed, keeping her connected to her past.
2. Textbook:  Dystopian fiction has been extremely popular the last few years with the rise of The Hunger Games and other dystopian series. This particular novel focuses on the dangers of being constantly bombarded with media of all forms, from advertisements to social media. The constant noise has kept them controlled by corporations and numbed them to the realities of the control and the reality of their world crumbling around them. Although I believe teenagers should read this as a cautionary tale in regards to the dangers of constantly being connected, I honestly think they will disagree with parallelism of their own lives to the characters in the novel.

Anderson, M. T. (2002). Feed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.