Review: The Word Exchange: A Novel By Alena Graedon

The Word Exchange: A Novel by Alena Graedon, Fiction/Sci-Fi & Fantasy, $11.99 Kindle on Amazon, Published April 10, 2014 by Random House LLC

Imagine that there is this device that not only can be used as a phone, but also a computer, translator, dictionary, e-reader, tablet, read your moods and dispense medication as needed. Now Imagine that the more you used this device the more you became sick and lost the ability to speak properly. In this book it's the Meme and Anana is finding this out the hard way when her father disappears.

Anana and her father, Doug, work for NADEL, one of the last hold outs that still makes actual print copies of dictionaries. Bart is Doug's assistant and hopelessly crushing on Anana forever. When Doug disappears and Anana finds a note telling her to not trust Bart, she doesn't know what to do. A chance encounter with the Diachronic Society helps her to navigate the troubles she faces. The Meme is being taken over by a virus and causing Word Flu. And what slowly starts as someone stumbling over their words quickly turns into an epidemic of people not only talking incoherently but dying from the Word Flu. There is a cure but only if you can find people who know about it - the Diachronic Society.

I struggled getting into this book as first. When Anana narrates it is very wordy and descriptive. Being that this is a book about dictionaries there were words over my head at times. But I kept reading and was quickly drawn in by the story of what could go wrong if we were to cross modern technology and bio-engineering. Alena Graedon weaves a story like no other sci-fi/fantasy that I have read. I loved the idea that something we use everyday for everything under the sun could cause us to become sick. This is her first book and I look forward to more if they are in this genre.