Quotes
“Alena Graedon’s
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 mash-up 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, New York Times bestselling author
“[A] fast-paced, thrill-a-minute
début novel…The sonic pleasures of Graedon’s degraded language are considerable…She
creates a powerful sense of mystery…[I] raced greedily to the last page,
enjoying Graedon’s plot-weaving every step of the way.”
New Yorker
“Clever, breathless, and sportively Hegelian in theme, The Word Exchange
combines the jaunty energy of youngish adult fiction with the spine-tingling chill of the science fiction conspiracy
genre…Graedon makes you wring your hands for her heroine—and tremble for
the future of the English language throughout her twenty-six chapters,
achieving the singular feat of turning the alphabet into a cliffhanger.
As much fun as Graedon has with her Borgesian doomsday scenario, her
novel folds serious meditations on language and society into its
manhunt.”
New York Times Book Review
“[Graedon] knows how to ratchet up
mystery. In [her] dystopian future, face-to-face interfacing is finished and
even email is a fading memory.”
Esquire (UK)
“A sobering look at how dependent
we are on technology and how susceptible we are to the distortions of
language.”
Washington Post
“Alena Graedon makes what sounds
like a preposterous premise believable in this clever first novel, a mystery
set in a dystopian near future.”
Chicago Tribune
“An ambitious debut…Graedon’s own
language is essential to the success of The
Word Exchange—it’s erudite, ruminative, and complex.”
Bustle
“Graedon’s spectacular, ambitious debut explores a near-future America
that’s shifted almost exclusively to smart technologies…Rife with literary allusions and philosophical wormholes that
aren’t only decorative but integral to characters’ abilities and
limitations in communicating, and it succeeds precisely because it’s as
full of humanity as it is of mystery and intellectual prowess.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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.”
Booklist (starred review)
“Language becomes a virus in this terrifying vision of the print-empty, Web-reliant culture of the twenty-second century…A wildly ambitious, darkly intellectual and inventive thriller about the intersection of language, technology, and meaning.”
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)