Review: Unpalatable
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 11 9, 2012
This story is preposterous on several levels. I picked it up for free, curious to see if the author could pull off the premise. She never came close.So, the food supply is decimated by a disease, with most farm animals, grains, and veggies wiped out. The government builds big, fenced-in ranches and gathers the remaining animals and crops. And decides that cannibalism is the way to go. Let's feed lots of precious food to our "human herd" for ten to fourteen years, then slaughter them to "feed the citizens." Technically, this is completely unsustainable. The math doesn't work. All that food to produce a few meals.If the government was surreptitiously harvesting humans and adding them to the existing food supply, that might be believable. But I don't care how hungry she is, no mother is going to sell her kids knowing they will be eaten by rich people.And while desperately hungry people have been known to resort to cannibalism, seemingly happy, healthy rich folks aren't going to attend a fancy auction and bid on groomed teens to grill up for a celebratory feast. You can't change an entire society's mindset that drastically in about twenty years, even if you label your intended meals "herd members," give them numbers instead of names, call mealtimes "grazing," send them to a "vet," and insist they have "hooves" and "fur" instead of feet and hair. These are mothers and fathers inspecting children. Does the author really think that little of humanity?The main character, a teen herd member, is telling us the story (I'm not sure how) even though speaking is forbidden among the herd, and her mother (sold into the herd at age ten) has taught her language during mealtimes and at bedtime. In whispers. Even taught her to write by shaping letters out of their food. On the sly. Really? This girl understands complex ideas like family and love and freedom, but isn't much interested in all of that. She'd rather just eat, sleep, and play in the gym until it's time for her to go to slaughter, because, you know, it's not such a bad life. Oh, and teach language to another boy so she has someone else to talk to. Golly, these must be the brightest minds left in this world, and they're going to serve them up on a spit.At the end we're left hanging; the story just stops. We can imagine that things go on just as they are because our narrator hasn't changed a bit, except she's upset that mom got sold off. Oh, wait, there's another story in the series. Of course there is. Well, nothing in this one has given me any reason to want to continue with this flawed, dismal tale.