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”. ( )

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. ( )

Very good balance between a very contemporary - maybe even too much - idea based on a common fear of technology, a thrilling plot and a more than decent writing. But beware: this is NOT Fahrenheit 451 for the Kindle age. ( )

Brilliant distopia world of word flu, difficult to read but absolutely brilliant ideas! ( )

It’s been a long time since I read a book like this, and I hope it will be a long time before I read another. This is the only book I have ever read that by the magic page number of 119, I literally threw it aside in disgust. To say it is a mess of ideas would be being generous, and I’m afraid to say I found it just to be a mess.

The main female protagonist is whiny and just downright annoying, coupled with her is the downright stalkerish alternate narrator combining into two characters I neither liked nor wanted to be bothered reading about anymore. None of the other lesser characters shone through the pages either, and this would have been a redeeming factor that would have made me continue reading.

As any follower of my reviews will know by now, it takes a lot for me to actually close a book unfinished, but I found the footnotes and the sometimes having to refer to a dictionary to understand what the Author was writing about too much to bear. In my opinion it was a very verbose piece of writing with very little plot and far too time consuming to be considered a novel. If this had been written as non-fiction and a reflection on current society’s reliance on technology to the detriment of everything else it would have been much better received by myself; as it was it was relegated to the pile of books I will be parting with shortly.

The only saving grace that kept it from receiving zero thumbs was the cover. I liked it a great deal and spent quite a time trying to link the cover images with the plot of the book. I love the English language and the words that are no longer in general use, and this was what attracted me to it in the first place, however over use of the language was a big turn off and because of this I feel I really can’t recommend this book to anyone.


Originally reviewed on: http://catesbooknuthut.com/2015/07/10/review-the-word-exchange-alena-graedon/





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