"FEEDBACK is a full-length Newsflesh novel which overlaps the events of Feed and covers the Presidential campaign from the perspective of reporters covering the Democrats side of the story. There are two sides to every story ... The year was 2014. We had cured cancer. We had beat the common cold. But in doing so we unleashed something horrifying and unstoppable. The infection spread leaving those afflicted with a single uncontrollable impulse: FEED. Now, twenty years after the Rising, a team of scrappy underdog reporters relentlessly pursue the truth while competing against the superstar Masons, surrounded by the infected, and facing more insidious forces working in the shadows."--
In 2014 we cured cancer, beat the common cold-- and unleashed an infection that unleashed an uncontrollable impulse to feed. Now, twenty years after the Rising, a team of scrappy underdog reporters relentlessly pursue the truth while competing against the superstar Masons. Surrounded by the infected, and facing more insidious forces working in the shadows, they hit the presidential campaign trail to uncover dangerous truths... or die trying.
I'm afraid that I have to agree with what other reviewers have said about this book. Feedback is a companion novel to the Newsflesh trilogy, one of my favourite series of all time. Mira Grant/Seanan McGuire is a wonderful writer in my opinion, it is simply that the setup of Feedback does not work very well. This book follows a different blogger team on the other end of the political spectrum.
Again, the team consists of an Irwin, two Newsies, and a Fictional. The issue is that the reader already knows what's going on in the background of the story - and I definitely would recommend reading Feedback AFTER completing the main trilogy, because it contains spoilers for the main novels - and there is little mystery. No matter how many zombies one throws at a cast of characters, no matter how lovely the diversity rep is in this book, in a way it feels like I had read this book before. And while I enjoyed the new characters, their dynamics weren't complex enough to keep me interested.
Feedback deserves a massive cheer, however, for being the first traditionally published book I ever read that has a genderfluid person as main character, who is consistently referred to as "they". It's one little step towards normalizing non-binary gender, and I love Ms McGuire for taking it.
--- Trigger warnings: violence, death of loved one, blood, captivity, assault.
