You’re probably thinking I’ve gone insane right now, aren’t you?  At least, literary snobs, those of you that have read Feed and those of you that have seen my review are.  I mean, a zombie novel in school.  How crazy can you get?  Well, it’s actually not that crazy.  So please hear me out before you pass judgment:
1.  It will engage high school students.

Yes, Feed has violence and coarse language.  Yes, it’s a zombie novel.  But I know for a fact that ‘worse’ books (content-wise) have been studied in school.  Does anyone here remember reading Catch-22 in high school English?  When I first read it, I was shocked that anyone ever studied this in school, yet it was still studied because it was a good novel.  Feed is an excellent novel and in my honest opinion, it’s no worse than Joseph Heller’s classic novel.  In some aspects, it is less ‘offensive’.

In most people’s minds zombies=awesome.  By high school, most people (especially boys in my experience) hate reading passionately.  Educators are always asking themselves how to improve reading scores and get kids interested in reading again.

Do you see where I’m going here?

Feed has all of the themes, messages and three dimensional characters that educators love to analyze to death while having all of the zombies, weapons and gross science that teenagers love.  It has bad language and violence (obviously), but for kids in grade 11 and 12…they’re going to see and hear a lot worse on television on an ordinary day. Continue reading →