Books That Made Me Cry - Feed
Books can affect you in any number of ways. Sometimes they introduce you to new ideas and make your world bigger. Sometimes they speak to something deep inside you and make you feel like someone else understands. Sometimes they just wrench your guts out and send a cascade of hot tears down your face and make you wish you hadn't started reading that chapter on the bus.
Feed by Mira Grant
HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!
When'd I read it? It was the summer of 2010, Borders was still a thing, and I picked up a couple of paperbacks that looked fun and pulpy, Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold and Mira Grant's Feed. One of them made me cry.
What's it about? It's the not-too-distant future and the zombie apocalypse has become the status quo. Everyone's a carrier of the zombie virus. On the plus side, no one gets cancer or the common cold anymore. On the minus side, whenever someone dies (or their viral load exceeds safe levels) they transform into a ravening zombie. This is where we find our heroes: Shaun and George (short for Georgia) Mason. A pair of co-dependent adoptive siblings who write a news/opinion/fiction/real-life-zombie-adventure blog with their best friend Georgette "Buffy" Meissonier. It's an election-year and they've won a contest to be the first embedded bloggers on a presidential campaign. But when a series of zombie outbreaks plagues the campaign it becomes clear that there's a conspiracy afoot! Can the Masons uncover the conspiracy? Is there enough Coca-Cola in the world to slake George's unending thirst? Will everyone make it out okay? I mean, I'm about to answer those questions so if you don't want spoilers, and didn't heed the warning earlier it's your own fault: Yes, no, no.
Why'd I cry? So, toward of the novel, Shaun and George have uncovered the conspiracy (well, part of it, it gets more elaborate), but George has been shot with a dart that will trigger her transformation into a zombie. The siblings lock themselves in their mobile blogging van (is it weird that this is the second time I've featured a book about a blogger on my blog) and George uses her last moments of lucidity to make a final post alerting the internet to the existence of the conspiracy before desperately begging her brother to kill her before she turns into a zombie. Looking at what I've written it seems a little silly, but it also made me cry. Mira Grant excels at writing characters who feel like real people (well, underneath their practiced cynicism and arch dialogue) and the fact that the narrator dies with a fair chunk of the book left took me by surprise (Shaun narrates the balance and returns as the narrator for the remainder of the trilogy (it's more complicated than that, but I'm only supposed to be spoiling Feed)). Anyway, yeah, this one definitely got to me.
Would it make me cry again if I re-read the book now? The Newsflesh trilogy didn't survive the bookshelf purges, but if I got my hands on another copy of Feed, I'd probably still cry when I got to this scene.
Links:
Looks like I've fallen behind, I've only read the trilogy, but apparently there's a whole three other books in the Newsflesh universe.
Feed by Mira Grant
HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!
When'd I read it? It was the summer of 2010, Borders was still a thing, and I picked up a couple of paperbacks that looked fun and pulpy, Joe Abercrombie's Best Served Cold and Mira Grant's Feed. One of them made me cry.
What's it about? It's the not-too-distant future and the zombie apocalypse has become the status quo. Everyone's a carrier of the zombie virus. On the plus side, no one gets cancer or the common cold anymore. On the minus side, whenever someone dies (or their viral load exceeds safe levels) they transform into a ravening zombie. This is where we find our heroes: Shaun and George (short for Georgia) Mason. A pair of co-dependent adoptive siblings who write a news/opinion/fiction/real-life-zombie-adventure blog with their best friend Georgette "Buffy" Meissonier. It's an election-year and they've won a contest to be the first embedded bloggers on a presidential campaign. But when a series of zombie outbreaks plagues the campaign it becomes clear that there's a conspiracy afoot! Can the Masons uncover the conspiracy? Is there enough Coca-Cola in the world to slake George's unending thirst? Will everyone make it out okay? I mean, I'm about to answer those questions so if you don't want spoilers, and didn't heed the warning earlier it's your own fault: Yes, no, no.
Why'd I cry? So, toward of the novel, Shaun and George have uncovered the conspiracy (well, part of it, it gets more elaborate), but George has been shot with a dart that will trigger her transformation into a zombie. The siblings lock themselves in their mobile blogging van (is it weird that this is the second time I've featured a book about a blogger on my blog) and George uses her last moments of lucidity to make a final post alerting the internet to the existence of the conspiracy before desperately begging her brother to kill her before she turns into a zombie. Looking at what I've written it seems a little silly, but it also made me cry. Mira Grant excels at writing characters who feel like real people (well, underneath their practiced cynicism and arch dialogue) and the fact that the narrator dies with a fair chunk of the book left took me by surprise (Shaun narrates the balance and returns as the narrator for the remainder of the trilogy (it's more complicated than that, but I'm only supposed to be spoiling Feed)). Anyway, yeah, this one definitely got to me.
Would it make me cry again if I re-read the book now? The Newsflesh trilogy didn't survive the bookshelf purges, but if I got my hands on another copy of Feed, I'd probably still cry when I got to this scene.
Links:
Looks like I've fallen behind, I've only read the trilogy, but apparently there's a whole three other books in the Newsflesh universe.
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