The Word Exchange

A fiendishly cleverdystopian novel for the digital age, The Word Exchange is a fresh,stylized, and decidedly original debut about the dangers of technology and thepower of the printed word.In the not-so-distant future, the forecasted death of printhas become a reality. Bookstores, libraries, newspapers, and magazines are athing of the past, as we spend our time glued to handheld devices called Memesthat not only keep us in constant communication but have become so intuitive asto hail us cabs before we leave our offices, order takeout at the first growlof a hungry stomach, and even create and sell language itself in a marketplacecalled the Word Exchange.Anana Johnson works with her father, Doug, at the NorthAmerican Dictionary of the English Language, where he ishard at work on the last edition that will ever be printed. Doug is astaunchly anti-Meme, anti-tech intellectual who fondly remembers the days when people used e-mail to communicate—or even actually spoke to one another. One evening, Doug dis appears, leaving a singlewritten clue: ALICE—a code word he and Anana devised to signal if one ofthem ever fell into harm's way. Thus begins Anana's journey down the proverbialrabbit hole.Joined by Bart, her bookish colleague, Anana's search for Doug will take her into darkbasement incinerator rooms, underground passages of the Mercantile Library,secret meetings of the anonymous Diachronic Society, the boardrooms of theevil online retailing site Synchronic, and ultimately to the hallowed halls ofthe Oxford English Dictionary—spiritual home of the written word. AsAna pieces together what is going on, and Bart gets sicker and sicker with thestrange word flu that has spread worldwide and causes people to speak ingibberish, Alena Graedon crafts a fresh, cautionary tale that is at once atechnological thriller and a thoughtful meditation on the price of technologyand the unforeseen, though very real, dangers of the digital age.