DEADLINE open thread. Have a party.

Okay...so I resurrected my rarely-used LJ account because I absolutely had to comment on this thread. (Also, my apologies in advance for what is probably going to be an absurdly long comment, but I don't usually get the opportunity to gush to an author about her own book.)

First of all, I loved this book. It was awesome muchness.

George's death in Feed broke my heart. I loved her as a character, loved seeing a heroine whose primary strength was her intelligence, not her ass-kicking abilities. (Not that I don't love ass kicking, but as a decidedly un-ass kicking female myself, it's harder to relate.) Also, I drink Coke like it's going out of style, so that's another point in George's favor! I didn't think anything else you could throw at me could be harder than that. But I was wrong.

Deadline broke my heart about a million times over. Shaun's grief was just so tangible. Unlike Feed, where it was only really the end that got to me, I was crying through about half the book when I read Deadline--and then some! I was walking home from getting lunch this afternoon, and I had just finished reading the part where Shaun asks George whether she'll always be with him--and he's conflicted, because he wants her there but he kind of doesn't. I started sobbing, just thinking about it. Luckily, I was wearing sunglasses--not because I have retinal KA, but because it's June, and June in DC tends to be quite sunny :) Anyway, so yeah...emotionally, I think it's a harder read than Feed.

The revelation about Shaun and George's relationship was kind of a surprise-but-not to me,. Throughout Feed, I thought, "Wow, my brother and I would *never* be like that. But for Shaun and George, it made sense. They were everything to one another, the only people in each other's lives they could really count on, given that their adoptive parents were so negligent and, as such, they both tended to be pretty distrustful by nature. In retrospect, it made sense that George, as first-person narrator, never came out and said it. I think she believed it was no one else's business, but also...I think she was a little bothered by other people's reactions to her and Shaun's relationship. (Shaun obviously was as well, as evidenced by his reaction during the conversation with Becks.) People gave them weird looks just because they were sharing hotel rooms. I'm guessing that the relationship between them was well-established long before Feed, and at some point they pretty much decided, "We're gonna do what we wanna do, and the hell with everyone else," and let people draw their own conclusions. It seems like, between themselves, they're pretty accepting of the whole thing. (Though I would LOVE to know how they got to that point. I can't imagine it was that simple for them in the beginning. Does that make me weird?)

If anything, the revelation of their relationship made the story that much more tragic. Shaun hadn't just lost a sister, or even a girlfriend...he lost his everything.

And of course, there was, "She would have gotten better." Oh my God. I had to stop reading for several minutes after that. (But I couldn't wait any longer to pick it back up again.)


I was never entirely convinced that mindGeorge was merely a manifestation of Shaun's grief/craziness. The fact that, when mindGeorge manifested physically, her eyes are no longer dialated from KA, and that cloneGeorge was the same way, makes me think even more that it wasn't entirely Shaun's imagination.

As much fun as the suspense/thriller aspects of the series are, it's the interpersonal relationships--especially the one between George and Shaun--that really hold me. Whether mindGeorge was just a figment of Shaun's grief-striken imagination, or she was something else altogether, I'm so glad George's presence was still so tangible here.