of a young author, The Word Exchange was generally praised by reviewers for its ambitious and inventive exploration of issues in language and technology. Among Booklist's "Best Crime Fiction Debuts" Bill Ott described it as "a bibliothriller of epidemic proportions … [that] offers a chilling prediction of where our unthinking reliance on technology is leading us." Liesl Schillinger in the New York Times Book Review called it, "...a nervy, nerdy dystopic thriller set in New York City in the very near future…. Clever, breathless and sportively Hegelian in theme..." On the other hand, as Rebecca Onion's review in Slate explains, about this "dazzling but unsatisfying debut novel … There's an inherent weakness in using the structure of a thriller to explore complex questions about technology and culture." At the end of the world, after all, one must join with the bookish word-loving good guys to defeat the greedy tech corporation bad guys, a pretty simple dichotomy. Colin Steele, in the Sydney Morning Herald, opined that "Graedon's narrative is littered with linguistic, literary, philosophical and musical references, but the whole ultimately never really coheres." References External links Penguin Random House: The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon 2014 American novels American science fiction novels 2014 debut novels Doubleday (publisher) books