[ephemeral]

The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon (April 2014)
Requirements: ePUB Reader | 2.45 Mb
Overview: A dystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange offers an inventive, suspenseful, and decidedly original vision of the dangers of technology and of the enduring power of the printed word.

In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted “death of print” has become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are things of the past, and we spend our time glued to handheld devices called Memes that not only keep us in constant communication but also have become so intuitive that they hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growl of a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplace called the Word Exchange.

Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL), where Doug is hard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is a staunchly anti-Meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used email (everything now is text or videoconference) to communicate—or even actually spoke to one another, for that matter. One evening, Doug disappears from the NADEL offices, leaving a single written clue: ALICE. It’s a code word he devised to signal if he ever fell into harm’s way. And thus begins Anana’s journey down the proverbial rabbit hole . . .

Joined by Bart, her bookish NADEL colleague, Anana’s search for Doug will take her into dark basements and subterranean passageways; the stacks and reading rooms of the Mercantile Library; and secret meetings of the underground resistance, the Diachronic Society. As Anana penetrates the mystery of her father’s disappearance and a pandemic of decaying language called “word flu” spreads, The Word Exchange becomes a cautionary tale that is at once a technological thriller and a meditation on the high cultural costs of digital technology.
Genre: Fiction, Literary Adventure/Romance, Speculative Fiction

"What if we became so dependent on our gadgets that we lost our ability to speak? That’s the big idea in Graedon’s entertainingly scary debut, a bibliothriller of epidemic proportions. In the nearish future, in a steampunky New York where messages travel by secret pneumatic tubes, Anana Johnson’s father, Doug, is preparing to launch the final edition of the North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL). Then he suddenly goes missing (both in real life and from his biographical entry in the dictionary), Anana sees something bizarre in the NADEL’s basement, and people start talking funny. Aphasia is the first symptom of “word flu,” a sickness that scrambles speech and renders some speakers permanently silent. It’s all tied to people’s habit of using their Memes (think iPhones to the tenth power) to buy words when they can’t remember them, Anana eventually learns. As in Dave Eggers’ The Circle (2013), Graedon’s fears about technology are clearly evident. There are a few stutters in the structure and pacing, but this is a remarkable first novel, combining a vividly imagined future with the fondly remembered past to offer a chilling prediction of where our unthinking reliance on technology is leading us. And, as you’d expect, Graedon’s word choice is exquisite." ~Booklist, starred review

"A spectacular debut is a story for our age of 'accelerated obsolescence.' A genuinely scary and funny mystery about linguistic slippage and disturbance, it's also a moving meditation on our sometimes comic, sometimes desperate struggles to speak, and to listen, and to mean something to one another. To borrow Graedon's own invention, The Word Exchange is 'Synchronic' -- a gorgeous genre mashup that offers readers the pleasures of noir, science fiction, romance, and philosophy. It's an unforgettable joyride across the thin ice of language." ~Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

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