Birdie’s Reviews > Hungry > Status Update

I gave up on doing a page by page read because it was too ridiculous. Oops.

Dear Lord, she's one of those, "I was born in the wrong time period" people!

"Thalia, we discussed this. You can't keep wearing old stuff like that." She points to my corduroy mini. "What's it made of, anyway?"
"A vintage natural fiber called cotton, thank you very much."

UGGGGGGGH. It's page eight and I hate her.

Thalia's grandmother on her mother's side is Vietnamese, and her grandfather on her mother's side is African American. It'd be some nice diversity, but there's this line--
I'm convinced there must be a humorless gene that comes sraight from my mother's Vietnamese side because Grandma Grace is the most serious woman I've ever met[...]'
And that line really rubs me the wrong way.

Terms like 'Silkese', 'Reenactor', 'the Relics', 'Synthamil', and 'Just-Like-Skin' are thrown at us on this page with reckless abandon. And that's just this page.
I know this is a dystopian, and I know that world building is hard, but this is ridiculous. This seems more like a cartoon than a book.

Christ, their personal computers-- that everyone has but only Thalia finds so annoying-- are legit called 'Gizmos'. Really? Gizmo? Like, "What's that gizmo?" "Oh, this? This is a Gizmo!"
It sounds like a lazy placeholder name Swain just decided to keep in the end.

Thalia's mother is a doctor. Apparently doctors don't touch people anymore; it's all machines now. Wouldn't that make them engineers rather than medical professionals?

This book doesn't have chapters, it has "parts", which go for about 100 something pages apiece. This is a huge pet-peeve of mine.

So it's a dystopian novel about a world witout food, and her name is Thalia Apple. Oh, pun-tastic.
Also, the prologue is a dream sequence that reads like a poorly directed avant-garde movie where she's trying to eat an apple (but does not know the word for it) but it falls out of a hole in her stomach.
This is not a good way to start a book.