DEADLINE REACTION POST
Likely as close as I'm going to get to an actual review, because frankly I suck at those. They require a lot of thought that I'm not as good at articulating as I was when I graduated.
What I REALLY wish I could've done was write a running-reactions post as I read the book, because that would've been a lot more entertaining, if not a lot more coherent. Thing is, I could not tear myself away from the book long enough to turn the laptop on. We're lucky I made the drive home from the bookstore without crashing.
First of all, this book was so much fun to read. There are myriad fantastic lines in this thing. I had to put the book down for laughing more than once. My first (and possibly still favorite, though a re-read will have to judge): "There's no way our building is generating spontaneous zombies."
On to things that are awesome: GEORGE.
If you've read Feed (again, SHOO if you haven't, because massive spoilers ahoy), you know its lovely, snarky, driven, wonderful POV character and protagonist is murdered a hundred pages from the end. If you think this means she isn't present in Deadline, you missed the memo about dead things not staying dead in the Newsflesh universe.
One of my absolute favorite aspects of Feed is Shaun and George's relationship. I love that they were unabashedly the most important part of each other's worlds. I love the snark and the care and the nearly seamless way they acted as a unit in all things.
This does not change in Deadline. The only thing that changes in Deadline is that only Shaun can hear George.
Shaun has been driven crazy by George's death. Fortunately for everyone involved, it's a manageable kind of crazy, and mostly involves having his dead sister living in the back of his head as a kind of split personality. George snarks, George comments, George keeps Shaun calm when nothing else can, and manifests when he's having his worst breakdowns. I love it. I love that Shaun once again effectively gave the finger to what "normal people" would call mental health and decided to how to live with what was happening in his own mind. I love how everyone reacts--the staff of After the End Times learning to ignore it, or deal in their own way, strangers giving him weird looks for talking to himself/thin air, psychologists and newbies trying to fix him, it runs the gamut.
Then there's Mahir, who talks to George twice. Oh, man. Did I love that? So much.
I don't think it would've worked for me if Shaun didn't know just how crazy he was, and how far he could push it. For all the ways in which he's not the kind of self-aware, faster-than-light thinker George was, he's always aware that his sister is dead, that the voice in his head is a figment, a coping mechanism, but he's also aware that he is functioning with the coping mechanism and he wouldn't without it, so he's going with functioning and screw whatever anyone thinks.
That said, I gotta say, it wasn't as good as Feed. (A book would have to work really hard for me to consider it better than Feed, though--I've been hard-pressed to come up with one ever since I read it. I'll get back to you if I think of something, but so far, nada.)
Deadline is slow for about the first four hundred pages, which is really hilarious when you consider the fact that the first hundred-plus pages take place in one day and have two close-call zombie attacks. But there's a lot of "this is the second book in a complicated world and I'm trying to shove enough exposition at you to get to the bit where this book makes it even more complicated" exposition, and IMO it wasn't handled as flawlessly as the exposition in Feed.
The pacing is also a little wonky. Feed hit the ground running (or, well, jumping a motorcycle over a zombie mob) and never once let up, but the group in Deadline, for all the moving they do, doesn't seem to get anywhere fast. Part of this is our new POV--Shaun is not Georgia (despite, er, evidence to the contrary). George's brain raced like anything, and even when we were living in her head I felt hard-pressed to keep up with her. Shaun is more reactionary than provocative, and I feel like a lot of what he does (that trip to Memphis just before the action kicks up, which I still haven't figured out the motivation for) is waiting for action, so he can react. That's legitimate characterization, and considering how much George and Shaun are kind of blurry around the edges, it's nice to have something defining them, but it makes for a book that doesn't hold my interest as well. There are places where this isn't true--the last 200 pages, the whole scene introducing Dr. Abbey's lab--but for the most part, that's how I'm parsing it right now.
Thinking on it, one of the reasons Deadline seems so much slower than Feed to me is the lack of Shaun caring about the news. He has wholly different motivations--the truth, the news, is important, but it's a means to an end, and he isn't constantly thinking about the site and getting good work out and making sure people know the truth. There aren't the little victories of climbing the ratings, hitting top-slot anywhere, expanding, posting. It doesn't drive him. Finding and tearing George's murderers into tiny pieces drives him, but again, it changes the structure of the book, and the ever-present need to be reporters in Feed just isn't there in Deadline, and it removes a measure of urgency, for all that they're in an arguably worse situation from minute one in Deadline.
It's a bridge book issue, too. Deadline worsens what happened in Feed and sets us up for Blackout. I know there are people out there whose favorite Star Wars is The Empire Strikes Back, but these people are not me. I like Jedi.
Gotta keep that in mind, this is a first, book-release-yay reading. Eventually I will re-read and may form some new thoughts.
Given how many people died or got elected to the presidency in Feed, it's unsurprising that we have an almost entirely new cast of characters for Deadline--or at least, secondary characters elevated to primary, in the character's version of the Levitz Paradigm (it's a comics thing. If you want me to explain it, ask). Becks, Alaric, Maggie, and Mahir from Feed join Shaun as our core cast--Irwin, Newsie, Fictional, and Mahir reprising his role as common sense and out-of-country infodrop. We are introduced to Kelly, granddaughter of the famous Dr. Matras who got the word out through his daughter's blog during the Rising, in the summer of 2014 (see Countdown, on Seanan McGuire's blog). They're fantastic characters, and I'm glad they're there, but no one quite has the punch of George and Shaun. Nature of having two protagonists who care first, last, and best about each other, I suppose. I felt pretty much the same about about Buffy and Rick in Feed.
There's always characters who leap out and surprise you, though, and in Deadline it was Dr. Abbey. LOVED her. She's fantastic. She's a bitch and a smartass and says whatever the fuck she wants and boy is she crazy like a fox. I really really really want her to be a main character in Blackout. Her dialogue is great, she's totally no-holds-barred, and she has all the scientific know-how and way more than enough sheer determination. I'm so very glad to meet her, and I really hope she gets a chance to meet George.
Oh, didn't I mention? The last three pages are from the POV of Georgia Mason.
Seriously, the last five pages of this book had me squeaking and leaping about and going "I knew it Iknewit! I called it! I knew she couldn't bring that up and leave it there! I knew that was too good to be true!" Happiness and glee, basically. Right from the moment that Kelly brought up cloning, I knew it wouldn't be a throw-away plot device for faking her death. There was no way. I wasn't sure how it would come up again until the coda, but from sentence one of the coda I was biting my lip and grinning and punching the air because I knew who that I was immediately, and it was not Shaun. It wasn't even the voice in Shaun's head.
"My name is Georgia Mason," I said. "What the fuck is going on here?"
Eeeeehee-heeee!!
Then there's the fourth(fifth?)-to-last page, the final Shaun POV. Where I began my "I totally called it!!" shiny happy dance. Because Shaun gets bitten by a zombie about fifty pages from the end, and we know, as readers, that our author is totally unafraid of pulling the plug on her POV character, and also that the structure of Deadline has mirrored Feed nicely (both books open with very similar lines). And it's a rule of Newflesh that if you're bitten, you'll amplify. Straight-out, no-holds-barred, you're-dead-already amplification. And as I was reading it I was going, "I remember the scene in Feed where George amplified, and this is taking too long. Shaun is too lucid. He's crazy, not a zombie. Oh--oh--ohohoh!" and put together a bunch of fantastically-placed foreshadowing from earlier in the book and came to the right conclusion probably at the same time Dr. Abbey was doing a dance in her lab after getting his blood test results back, because best test subject ever. It took Shaun a little longer, but that's okay. He isn't following narrative structure.
So that's Deadline. A lot of fun, some zombies, a virus-related twist or three, and in the grand tradition of Feed, snark, blogging, and conspiracies.
I had great fun. I'm rec'ing it. Start with Feed, come along on Deadline, and then wait with the rest of us poor souls for Blackout to release next year. It'll be a long wait, but at least this year I'll have two Newsflesh books to re-read instead of just one.
Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can.
This entry was originally posted at http://anthimeria.dreamwidth.org/27670.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
What I REALLY wish I could've done was write a running-reactions post as I read the book, because that would've been a lot more entertaining, if not a lot more coherent. Thing is, I could not tear myself away from the book long enough to turn the laptop on. We're lucky I made the drive home from the bookstore without crashing.
First of all, this book was so much fun to read. There are myriad fantastic lines in this thing. I had to put the book down for laughing more than once. My first (and possibly still favorite, though a re-read will have to judge): "There's no way our building is generating spontaneous zombies."
On to things that are awesome: GEORGE.
If you've read Feed (again, SHOO if you haven't, because massive spoilers ahoy), you know its lovely, snarky, driven, wonderful POV character and protagonist is murdered a hundred pages from the end. If you think this means she isn't present in Deadline, you missed the memo about dead things not staying dead in the Newsflesh universe.
One of my absolute favorite aspects of Feed is Shaun and George's relationship. I love that they were unabashedly the most important part of each other's worlds. I love the snark and the care and the nearly seamless way they acted as a unit in all things.
This does not change in Deadline. The only thing that changes in Deadline is that only Shaun can hear George.
Shaun has been driven crazy by George's death. Fortunately for everyone involved, it's a manageable kind of crazy, and mostly involves having his dead sister living in the back of his head as a kind of split personality. George snarks, George comments, George keeps Shaun calm when nothing else can, and manifests when he's having his worst breakdowns. I love it. I love that Shaun once again effectively gave the finger to what "normal people" would call mental health and decided to how to live with what was happening in his own mind. I love how everyone reacts--the staff of After the End Times learning to ignore it, or deal in their own way, strangers giving him weird looks for talking to himself/thin air, psychologists and newbies trying to fix him, it runs the gamut.
Then there's Mahir, who talks to George twice. Oh, man. Did I love that? So much.
I don't think it would've worked for me if Shaun didn't know just how crazy he was, and how far he could push it. For all the ways in which he's not the kind of self-aware, faster-than-light thinker George was, he's always aware that his sister is dead, that the voice in his head is a figment, a coping mechanism, but he's also aware that he is functioning with the coping mechanism and he wouldn't without it, so he's going with functioning and screw whatever anyone thinks.
That said, I gotta say, it wasn't as good as Feed. (A book would have to work really hard for me to consider it better than Feed, though--I've been hard-pressed to come up with one ever since I read it. I'll get back to you if I think of something, but so far, nada.)
Deadline is slow for about the first four hundred pages, which is really hilarious when you consider the fact that the first hundred-plus pages take place in one day and have two close-call zombie attacks. But there's a lot of "this is the second book in a complicated world and I'm trying to shove enough exposition at you to get to the bit where this book makes it even more complicated" exposition, and IMO it wasn't handled as flawlessly as the exposition in Feed.
The pacing is also a little wonky. Feed hit the ground running (or, well, jumping a motorcycle over a zombie mob) and never once let up, but the group in Deadline, for all the moving they do, doesn't seem to get anywhere fast. Part of this is our new POV--Shaun is not Georgia (despite, er, evidence to the contrary). George's brain raced like anything, and even when we were living in her head I felt hard-pressed to keep up with her. Shaun is more reactionary than provocative, and I feel like a lot of what he does (that trip to Memphis just before the action kicks up, which I still haven't figured out the motivation for) is waiting for action, so he can react. That's legitimate characterization, and considering how much George and Shaun are kind of blurry around the edges, it's nice to have something defining them, but it makes for a book that doesn't hold my interest as well. There are places where this isn't true--the last 200 pages, the whole scene introducing Dr. Abbey's lab--but for the most part, that's how I'm parsing it right now.
Thinking on it, one of the reasons Deadline seems so much slower than Feed to me is the lack of Shaun caring about the news. He has wholly different motivations--the truth, the news, is important, but it's a means to an end, and he isn't constantly thinking about the site and getting good work out and making sure people know the truth. There aren't the little victories of climbing the ratings, hitting top-slot anywhere, expanding, posting. It doesn't drive him. Finding and tearing George's murderers into tiny pieces drives him, but again, it changes the structure of the book, and the ever-present need to be reporters in Feed just isn't there in Deadline, and it removes a measure of urgency, for all that they're in an arguably worse situation from minute one in Deadline.
It's a bridge book issue, too. Deadline worsens what happened in Feed and sets us up for Blackout. I know there are people out there whose favorite Star Wars is The Empire Strikes Back, but these people are not me. I like Jedi.
Gotta keep that in mind, this is a first, book-release-yay reading. Eventually I will re-read and may form some new thoughts.
Given how many people died or got elected to the presidency in Feed, it's unsurprising that we have an almost entirely new cast of characters for Deadline--or at least, secondary characters elevated to primary, in the character's version of the Levitz Paradigm (it's a comics thing. If you want me to explain it, ask). Becks, Alaric, Maggie, and Mahir from Feed join Shaun as our core cast--Irwin, Newsie, Fictional, and Mahir reprising his role as common sense and out-of-country infodrop. We are introduced to Kelly, granddaughter of the famous Dr. Matras who got the word out through his daughter's blog during the Rising, in the summer of 2014 (see Countdown, on Seanan McGuire's blog). They're fantastic characters, and I'm glad they're there, but no one quite has the punch of George and Shaun. Nature of having two protagonists who care first, last, and best about each other, I suppose. I felt pretty much the same about about Buffy and Rick in Feed.
There's always characters who leap out and surprise you, though, and in Deadline it was Dr. Abbey. LOVED her. She's fantastic. She's a bitch and a smartass and says whatever the fuck she wants and boy is she crazy like a fox. I really really really want her to be a main character in Blackout. Her dialogue is great, she's totally no-holds-barred, and she has all the scientific know-how and way more than enough sheer determination. I'm so very glad to meet her, and I really hope she gets a chance to meet George.
Oh, didn't I mention? The last three pages are from the POV of Georgia Mason.
Seriously, the last five pages of this book had me squeaking and leaping about and going "I knew it Iknewit! I called it! I knew she couldn't bring that up and leave it there! I knew that was too good to be true!" Happiness and glee, basically. Right from the moment that Kelly brought up cloning, I knew it wouldn't be a throw-away plot device for faking her death. There was no way. I wasn't sure how it would come up again until the coda, but from sentence one of the coda I was biting my lip and grinning and punching the air because I knew who that I was immediately, and it was not Shaun. It wasn't even the voice in Shaun's head.
"My name is Georgia Mason," I said. "What the fuck is going on here?"
Eeeeehee-heeee!!
Then there's the fourth(fifth?)-to-last page, the final Shaun POV. Where I began my "I totally called it!!" shiny happy dance. Because Shaun gets bitten by a zombie about fifty pages from the end, and we know, as readers, that our author is totally unafraid of pulling the plug on her POV character, and also that the structure of Deadline has mirrored Feed nicely (both books open with very similar lines). And it's a rule of Newflesh that if you're bitten, you'll amplify. Straight-out, no-holds-barred, you're-dead-already amplification. And as I was reading it I was going, "I remember the scene in Feed where George amplified, and this is taking too long. Shaun is too lucid. He's crazy, not a zombie. Oh--oh--ohohoh!" and put together a bunch of fantastically-placed foreshadowing from earlier in the book and came to the right conclusion probably at the same time Dr. Abbey was doing a dance in her lab after getting his blood test results back, because best test subject ever. It took Shaun a little longer, but that's okay. He isn't following narrative structure.
So that's Deadline. A lot of fun, some zombies, a virus-related twist or three, and in the grand tradition of Feed, snark, blogging, and conspiracies.
I had great fun. I'm rec'ing it. Start with Feed, come along on Deadline, and then wait with the rest of us poor souls for Blackout to release next year. It'll be a long wait, but at least this year I'll have two Newsflesh books to re-read instead of just one.
Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can.
This entry was originally posted at http://anthimeria.dreamwidth.org/27670.html. Please comment there using OpenID.