Deadline

Deadline by Mira Grant

The penultimate book of any series, especially a trilogy, is often full of exposition and setup. Their primary focus tends to be just setting up the series finale. Deadline succeeds at doing this in an entertaining and gripping way. While not nearly as good as its predecessor—and really, nothing Mira Grant could have written as a sequel would have matched Feed—it was a very, very good book. I liked it a lot.

I didn’t love it, though. That’s due in large part to Grant’s use of Shaun as the narrator this time around. I don’t think she fully captured Shaun as a narrator. Some things—his knowledge of certain things like broomstick skirts (what are those?) being one—seem out of character for him; others, like his narration of a love scene, come across as way to female.

Another issue I had is that I felt this would have been better as two novels instead of one. There was a little too much going on, and that led to some very important moments getting obscured or overshadowed. In my opinion, Deadline’s big reveal happened too early in the book. By the end, it seems underplayed. But it’s a really big deal. Perhaps it is a matter of pacing, which seemed off. In the middle 20% of the novel, there were too many long passages of exposition in some spots and disjointed periods of action in others. The beginning and end were fantastic, though. Seems like the author took a little while to find her groove. That often happens when an author is trying to get too much to happen in one book.

Still, the story was great. Where Feed was ultimately about love and courage, Deadline is about heartbreak and introspection. The story begins nearly a year after the end of Feed, and are introduced to the characters while still reeling from the tragedy of that first novel. The biggest single thing in many of their lives is coping. As the plot progresses, we see them deal with other losses, from life to love to peace of mind. At its heart, Deadline is a story of living through loss. Obviously, it starts with Shaun, but it doesn’t end with him.

This represents Grant’s biggest victory in Deadline. Where many stories fail—this list includes The Hunger Games trilogy to just about every Denzel Washington movie made in the 2000s—is that the plots are written such that many of the characters exist for the sole purpose of assisting the protagonist in completing his/her path. The characters in Deadline have their own journeys, and those journeys are central to the plot. It is not all about Shaun, and Grant uses one of her characters, Alaric, to remind us (and Shaun) of that fact. Shaun’s progression is central to the story, but so are Rebecca’s and Madalene’s and Kelly’s and Mahir’s and Alaric’s. All of these people matter, all of their choices matter, not just to Shaun or to Shaun’s arc, but to the big picture. These characters, including Shaun, are links of the chain, pieces of the puzzle, and they all must work both separately and together. That is the brilliance of the world Mira Grant created in this Newsflesh series.

Not coincidentally, this also describes the virus that has caused all the trouble in this world. I’m not a virologist, but the thought behind the science and development of the Kellis-Amberlee virus continues to impress me. The more we readers learn about the virus, its behavior, and the defenses against it, the more engrossed I become in the story. The three major twists in Deadline (I’m angry with myself for not seeing the third one coming) are all related to the science of and around Kellis-Amberlee. While all fiction is manufactured, none of this feels pasted.

Also, I loved the use of George as character in this novel. I thought Grant handled her perfectly, and her interactions with Shaun felt natural and in line with what we read in Feed. It was not an easy thing to pull off, but Grant did. George’s presence added to the story and added to the depth of Shaun, Rebecca, and Mahir. It also, in a way, made Feed a little more profound for me, and I’d already rated it an A.

Deadline was a terrific read. I absolutely love this series.

B+