Food all died off. Our characters have food names. Thalia Apple, yes that's her name, takes us through a long and arduous book.

What's it about? It's, uh, about using magical supplements to starve off hunger and poop questions.

I dunno. I guess people don't poop because they act weird about going to the bathroom??? It's a conversation piece, I guess. But not using your stomach or anus means it will atrophy and break down in many ways.

Yes, I spent my reading fixated on the digestive system shriveling and rotting. That was my submersion being severed.

I guess if you don't know a lot about biology you can read this book and get through it without questioning too much, but the thing is is that all these supplements and stuff wouldn't work to feed a human being and have their internals working healthily. The stomach still needs food put in to digest and without that it becomes it needs bacteria introduced to fight off and the blood needs certain things like iron rich food, so this book had me thinking about all of the flaws and impossibilities of this. And it really didn't lean into magic enough so I couldn't just say "oh it's magic bs" and move on.

Another thing is babies need certain bacteria introduced to them by milk and buy other foods in order to have a healthy gut bacteria that can digest things, if there is nothing to digest then people of this generation and the future generations would be born without any digestion abilities and they were get refeeding sickness from it.

I couldn't immerse myself for questioning everything this book offered. It feels like they should have found a couple of editors or even biology majors and asked how well this could work.

Even vegans use animal based supplements to fill in the gap left by not eating animal or animal products. Meaning that there is no perfect animal less diet out there because no matter what we will all need eggs or meat or some kind of supplement and that still requires eating food and it going through the stomach and the body taking the nutrients from that. No matter what, food needs to go in, even if it's just with supplements on the side. I know that they mentioned kudzu a lot but I don't remember them eating it and if they did it's still not enough to go along with the supplements.

1 star. I can't even guess who the target audience is. ( )

Boy, are we running out of dystopian ideas.

(I don't know if the GIF is appropriate. I just wanted to insert Italian Spiderman here somewhere.)

A tale set in a future world where food is no longer necessary and famine and food-related illnesses no longer exist, Thalia begins to feel hunger when the appetite-suppressing medicine her parents' employers created stops working.

Actual rating: 2½ stars. This book was O.K. I hated it so much during the first 200 pages and I was actually thinking about DNF'ing, but due to guilt, I just couldn't. Briefly, here are a few of my thoughts on the book:

- The premise of the book was ridiculous. Just read the synopsis.

- The main character, Thalia, annoyed me - and Basil, too. (Thalia Apple and Eli Basil? What in the world? Ooh, Apple and Basil are hungry! How creative.)

- One word: instalove. She got butterflies during their first meeting, I mean COME ON.

- The whole book just felt so forced. In an effort to make the book dystopian-ish, the author threw random terms in that just sounded fake and too try-hard. Eg: Smaurto, Gizmo, Forno? Seriously?!

- The world building was terrible.

- I can't take this book seriously. I mean, look at this excerpt:

I turn to Basil and whisper, "Is everybody here, you know . . . ?"

"Are they what?" he whispers back.

"Like us?" I ask. "You know, hungry."

I literally snorted when I read it. It sounds so silly, how can one take this seriously?

- The first half of the book dragged really slowly, and as a result, everything just felt crammed together at the end. When I reached about 90% of the book, I was wondering how everything that needed to happen would fit into the last 10%. As a result of all this, the ending just felt abrupt and unsatisfactory. However, the action-y parts of the book were pretty gripping.

Overall, I wouldn't really recommend this book as a go-to dystopia. It took me a whole month to get into the book and it kind of irritated me at points. Nevertheless, if there was a second book, I think I'd read it because the last hundred or so pages leveled the story up a bit. And I think it'd have potential, since the ending of the first book acted as a stair step which would connect to the second book pretty nicely. ( )

Hungry by H. A. Swain is a chilling portrayal of what our future could be if our society continues down its current trajectory as well as a coming-of-age story about a girl named Thalia when she realizes her world is much different than she thought. I have to admit that there are days when I wish I could just chug my Synthamil and not have to plan what meals to cook for breakfast, lunch and dinner, but a world without chocolate is obviously unacceptable! Hungry is a refreshing combination of believable future technologies, friend and family relationships that actually make sense, and a dystopian society that gets back to the grittier roots of the genre. There is of course also the adorable but forbidden romance, but since Hungry is a standalone you don’t have to worry about love triangle developing ;-).
Note: I received Hungry from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. Some things may have changed in the final version.



Hungry by H. A. Swain
Published by Feiwel & Friends on June 3rd, 2014
Genres: Dystopia, YA
Length: 384 pages
How I got my copy: Publisher

In the future, food is no longer necessary—until Thalia begins to feel something unfamiliar and uncomfortable. She’s hungry.

In Thalia’s world, there is no need for food—everyone takes medication (or “inocs”) to ward off hunger. It should mean there is no more famine, no more obesity, no more food-related illnesses, and no more war. At least that's what her parents, who work for the company that developed the inocs, say. But when Thalia meets a boy who is part of an underground movement to bring food back, she realizes that most people live a life much different from hers. Worse, Thalia is starting to feel hunger, and so is he—the inocs aren’t working. Together they set out to find the only thing that will quell their hunger: real food.

Strengths:
The premise of Hungry is hauntingly believable. We’re already trying to synthesize and prepackage food as much as we can, so it isn’t hard to imagine a world where you just drink your perfectly calibrated nutritional beverage in the morning and at night. Add to that the idea of a world where we can’t produce enough actual food to support the population, and you end up in the scary but very believable world of Hungry.
As a computer science nerd, I can’t help but evaluate what technological gadgets are included in futuristic settings, but Hungry is spot on in the technology the future could have. Self-driving cars? Handheld gadgets that make recommendations on who you would want to befriend and what new attraction you’ll enjoy? People so completely immersed in their virtual worlds that physical contact is now frowned upon? Not too hard to believe right??
Thalia made for a solid main character. She definitely felt like a teenager, but that is both because she is rather offended when the world isn’t how she thought it was and because she grows quickly and passionately throughout Hungry. She starts as an adorable nerd who just likes to hack into systems and bother the status quo, but has to change quickly as her world shifts. I liked who she was at the start and I loved who she was by the end of Hungry.
I’m really enjoying this trend of parents and extended family playing a larger role in young adult stories. Thalia is best friends with her grandmother and her dad as soon as Hungry starts. She has a typically rocky relationship with her mother, but the bonds with her family continue to play a major role throughout Hungry; so good to see!
Hungry is a standalone! I was a little nervous about how it was going to wrap everything up as I got to the end, but it manages to end at a very satisfying point and tells a complete story without falling to the temptation of dragging things out into multiple books.

Weaknesses:
I can’t help being overly critical of science in sci-fi books, so this isn’t something that will bother most of you I’m sure. For the most part, Hungry handles the science of how people could be genetically engineered to no longer feel Hunger, but that just made the few mistakes regarding how mutations work stand out more to me.
Thalia and Basil are pretty cute most of the time, but they start to get annoying at various points when their whole “from different worlds” tension gets brought up over and over again. A lot of the plot gets moved along because one of them does something foolish and the other goes along to try to help diffuse the situation….
Hungry is a bit strange because there are no chapters (at least not in the ARC, if this gets changed I’ll update!). It is broken up into four parts, but if you are one of those readers who has to stop at chapter breaks, you might be in for a late night.

Summary:
Hungry by H. A. Swain is an excellent futuristic sci-fi and a breath of fresh air in the YA dystopian trend. It incorporates a lot of the more classic sci-fi elements since it backs up the premise with believable science and technology, while still being exceedingly readable with a cute romance for YA fans. There will always be a part of me that wants a sequel of every good book in order to find out more about the world, but Hungry tells an excellent story as a standalone. I definitely recommend Hungry for fans of YA that loved the dystopian trend but got sick of the tropes! ( )