Name: The Word Exchange
ISBN: 9780385537650

Alena Graedon

"A fiendishly clever dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange is a fresh, stylized, and decidedly original debut about the dangers of technology and the power of the printed word"--

The Word Exchange

Teaghan Grayson

If a great novel is one that nests in your mind, causing you to return to it and wrestle with it and let it guide how you think about the world, The Word Exchange qualifies for me*. It isn't a perfect novel and I'd give it 4.5 stars if that was a thing allowed by Goodreads, but the novel's commentary on modern society's relationship to technology and what it's doing to our bodies and our souls is striking and gives me a bit of an ominous and guilty feeling in the pit of my stomach. The author's novel way of playing with words and structure to lift the story, the obvious depth of research, and the willful engagement with serious ideas is icing on the cake. The characters are a bit hit-or-miss and the genre switch from sci-fi thriller to apocalypse novel is jarring, but neither takes away too much from the author's purpose in writing the novel. In the end, that's the real test as to whether or not you like this book: if you can live with ideas and theme take precedent over character and plot, you will likely enjoy this book as much as I did. If you can't you probably won't.

*On the other hand, perhaps reading it over my honeymoon is what draws my thoughts back to it and that beautiful experience more than anything about the book itself.

UPDATE, December 2020: Finished a reread of this book, and my opinion of it is much lower the second time around. When you know how little the book's initial mystery matters to the core of the plot, the whole first half of the book reveals itself to be plodding exposition. The idea behind the book remains interesting, which gets it tell stars, and there is probably a really interesting short story or novella in here somewhere, but the actually novel is overstuffed and an underwhelming slog.

b.andherbooks

In the near future, smart phones evolved to the point where they anticipate your every need and provide all the basic functions of communication and news, effectively killing off printed materials. A few "luddites" try to maintain the integrity of the written word but overall technology has won. Even Anana, a struggling artist and low-ranking employee at one of the last printed dictionaries, is a slave to her device, but when she is pulled into a dangerous plot to completely subvert language by turning it into a profit generating businses, she learns sometimes reliance on technology can be a very dangerous, and even lethal, thing.

Such a promising premise, but unfortunately the writing style left me cold. The story was written as if the characters themselves were writing a history of events, so I never felt drawn into the action or seriously concerned. Obviously if they were writing about events they were going to survive all along. The addition of the "romance" between Anana and her co-worker Bart was a stretch. I ended up skimming through to the end just to finish.

That said, I am sure there are many who would really respond to this story, it just wasn't to my personal style.

Daryl Houston

I liked the book but had hoped it'd be a little more highbrow than it turned out to be. It sits for me in the same tier of literary accomplishment that a lot of Stephenson and Powers sit, in that it takes an interesting idea and deals with it in a way that's more sophisticated in a literary sense than the way in which a Dan Brown or a Michael Chrichton deals with it but that falls short stylistically of other authors I admire and is accordingly sort of disappointing.

Dennis Jacob Rosenfeld

Ashley McFarland

Allison

Cindy Lieberman

In a world where the "death of print" has become a near reality, Anana Johnson, an employee at the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL), searches for her missing father and stumbles upon the spiritual home of the written world and a pandemic "word flu." 50,000 first printing.

The Word Exchange

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