★★☆☆☆ Let's try that one more time...

Feedback

Mira Grant

** Warning, spoilers for Feed, Deadline, Blackout, and Rise follow **

Feedback is book four in Mira Grant (AKA Seanan McGuire)'s Newsflesh series. First question: do you have to read the previous Newsflesh books before reading Feedback? Well, there are two answers to that question:

1. Yes, you have to. The Newsflesh world-building is not complete enough in Feedback for it to make sense without the previous books.

2. No, you should not. Reading Feed, Deadline, and Blackout will make it impossible to enjoy Feedback.

These answers seem contradictory, but they are not. What it comes down to is that there is no strategy that will make it possible to enjoy reading Feedback.

It's only fair that I tell you where I'm coming from. I read Feedback as part of my project of reading everything McGuire has published. While I love, love, LURVE the books she has published her own name (that would be mainly Incrytpid, October Daye, and Wayward Children), I have so far found her Mira Grant books ungood. The Parasitology series was dreadful -- one star to two-star, and Newsflesh only a little better: two to three star. Thus, if you have already read Newsflesh books and liked them, know that my opinion will be of little value to you.

In Feedback, McGuire does something very peculiar: she repeats the story told in Feed, Deadline, Blackout, and Rise: a quirky band of intrepid reporters covering a political campaign discovers a ginormous conspiracy around the zombie virus, of the sort you will find plausible only if you are the type who believes that the moon-landings were faked and that the Sandy Hook school shootings were a false-flag operation. It is the EXACT SAME ginormous conspiracy as in the previous Newsflesh books., with the exact same bad guys doing the exact same bad stuff. (Most of the good guys are new -- that's the main difference.)

Look, I'm not a spoiler Nazi -- I don't mind having some idea where the plot is going before I start reading a story. But if you put this proposition to me, "Remember that book you just read that you didn't like all that much? How would you like to read it again, but with some of the names and personalities changed?" -- well, my enthusiasm is muted.

In conclusion, my only really positive feeling after reading this book is relief that I have now finished the entire Newsflesh oeuvre and can move on to the Mira Grant mermaid novels, which my Goodreads associates have intimated are better. I sure hope so. My superpower is the ability to read tedious documents. (As superpowers go, this is far less fun and exciting than flying or shooting energy beams out of my hands, but you take what you get.) I'm am becoming a bit tired of using it.

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