Feed by M. T. Anderson

"I cried, sitting by her bed, and I told her the story of us. 'It's about the feed,' I said. 'It's about this meg normal guy, who doesn't think about anything until one wacky day, when he meets a dissident with a heart of gold.' I said, 'Set against the backdrop of American in its final days, it's the high-spirited story of their love together, it's laugh-out-loud funny, really heartwarming, and a visual feast."

In a time, not to far in the future, almost everybody has a 'feed'. A transmitter implanted directly into your brain, the feed enables you to communicate instantaneously with any other user, making conversation unnecessary. The feed can find the answer to any question for you, making school unnecessary. And, above all, the feed is a marvelous tool for making all of those important shopping decisions. When Titus, an "meg normal" guy meets Violet, an unusual girl, he begins to understand some unsettling things about his America. Anderson has created an entertaining, yet chilling, satire about where our country--and our youth--are headed. This book belongs on any bookshelf with Huxley, Orwell, and Vonnegut. For a truly enjoyable experiences, listen to the audio book, which adds a special zing to all of that consumerism.

SLJ recommends grades 8 and up.

Learn more at HCL and here.

Rash by Pete Hautman

"Back when Gramps was in high school, kids ran faster. Gramps claimed to have run 100 meters in 11 seconds, and the mile in 4:37. That was before the Child Safety Act of 2033. Now every high school runner has to wear a full set of protective gear--AtherSafe shoes with lateral ankle support and four layers of memory gel in the thick soles, knee pads, elbow pads, neck brace, tooth guard, wrist monitor, and an FDHHSS-cerified sports helmet. We raced on an Adzorbium track with its five centimeters of compacted gel-foam topped by a thick sheet of artificial latex. It's like running on a sponge."

In a not too distant future when the USA has become the USSA--the United Safer States of America, when obesity is a felony, and when 24% of the American population is imprisoned for acts of unsafe behavior, Bo is just a teenage boy struggling to obey the rules. After unintentionally spreading a psychosomatic rash through his school, Bo is sent to prison. For a young man raised in a highly supervised safer society, the anonymity of life in his prison camp is only slightly less tolerable than the intentional danger the warden is about to expose him to. His only way out might be an artificial intelligence homework assignment gone wrong. Pete Hautman challenges us to take a look at our current society of safety and wonder where it will take us in just a few short years.

SLJ recommends grades 8 and up.

Learn more at HCL, Amazon, and here.