Alena Graedon

2.75 stars

It’s a little bit into the future and almost everyone uses a “Meme”, a recent handheld device that does pretty much everything, including coming up with language/words for people to use. Print dictionaries are almost at an end. Doug is working on the last one that will be printed, but when he disappears, he leaves a clue for his daughter, Anana. While she searches for him, Memes start controlling more and more of people’s language as they also need to pay for words (via “The Word Exchange”. Not only that, there is now a “word flu” making its rounds where people are not only not feeling well, they are garbelling their words.

I feel like I might have liked it better and paid better attention if I hadn’t listened to the audio. I got the gist of the bulk of what was happening, and was a little bit interested, but not completely. Hmm, in some ways (based on other reviews), maybe the audio was better? I didn’t notice too many super-big words that made it hard to understand, and I mostly didn’t have an issue understanding what people were trying to say when garbled words were coming out – that was likely easier due to hearing the “word” rather than reading it. Overall, I’m rating it just under “ok”.… (más)

This is a book that I'd categorise as speculative fiction. It's described as set in the near future but to me it felt more like it was set in a parallel universe. I checked when it was written - 2014 - so the iPhone was around at the time but that never gets mentioned. And social media never really gets much of a mention which is surprising.

It has a clever premise - that words and definitions of words are up for sale by a sinister corporation who are changing the use of language through their device - the Meme - and dumbing down the population.

Unfortunately, I found it a little wordy in places and once or twice I felt like I was reading a lecture. I put it down once or twice and debated whether to finish it although I'm glad that I carried on as I felt it got more interesting further on.

To me, the novel was quite anti technology and a warning against over reliance on it. The heroes of the resistance are luddites basically.

I also didn't like the hero, Bart, very much. For someone who is supposedly in love with Ana/Alice, he certainly never protests about how badly her boyfriend Max behaves towards Ana.

But the idea of the word flu, a computer virus spilling over into the real world and causing a pandemic was very scary.

I loved how the author made up words and put them into dialogue to show how the word flu affected people. It did remind me of the Jaberwocky poem and Lewis Carroll is alluded to a couple of times and of course, Ana's nickname is Alice.… (más)