This book absolutely devastated me in a way I was not prepared for. The neediness of Sean to feel something, anything, on a deeper level coupled with the neuro pairing to the wolf, Kate, is heartwrenching to begin with and it only deepens as the story unfolds. The heartbreak and loss are palpable and I must admit that it had reduced me to tears by the end.

The lack of knowledge of the supporting characters really helps drive home the feeling of loneliness that Sean exudes and while it's not a choice everyone will enjoy, I did find that it worked well for setting the tone. In my opinion, giving more profound insight into the others would have distracted from the desperation Sean exudes.

I absolutely recommend this book and look forward to its publication.

Feed Them Silence is a sci-fi novella about a scientist, Sean, the flawed but fully fleshed main character we will follow very closely, who wants to research one of the last packs of wolves in existence. What makes this research different is that Sean wants to share the mind of one of the wolves, Kate. A questionable choice, maybe just flashy in order to get the grant the group needs, but a pivoting point in Sean’s crumbling life, who suddenly feels like in control again, almost as if the wolves were something of her property.
I did not expect this story to have so much power in its brief length. Although it is true that the secondary characters kind of blur into the background and their voices intermix, Sean’s voice is loud enough to carry, the sadness, the lack of belonging, the questionable ethics surrounding the funding (never trust money that comes from private intentions). Beware also that there are a couple of wolf-related scenes that might be kind of uncomfortable for some readers, but if one can leave them behind Feed Them Silence transforms in an amazingly written novella about what it means to be human, what human nature could really mean and, above all, what human mistakes make to us and our surrounding,
(Thanks to NetGalley and Tordotcom for a free copy of the ebook in exchange for an honest review.)

Feed Them Silence is short (112 pages) This is a Sci-Fi story about a scientist of "questionable" ethics researching one of the last packs of wolves in the wild, Feed Them Silence is a deep dive into loneliness, and measures we will take to create connections with one another. This book was SO MUCH more than I thought it was going to be and I'm still thinking about it hours after reading it. It's short enough to do a re-read so that's exactly what I'm going to do. 5/5 stars absolutely.

As a massive fan of Mandelo's other work- Summer Sons is in my top 10 books of all time- I was thrilled to get my hands on Feed Them Silence. Mandelo's writing is stunning, and this book really solidified that book for me. I love a story full of flawed characters making mistakes, so Sean hit the mark for me perfectly. While I did struggle to connect with any of the side characters, it didn't take away too much of my enjoyment of the jaw dropping plot. The former wolf kid in me was screaming with horror and delight the entire time, and I really enjoyed it.

an absolutely devastating story of humanity, connection, and the harm we do to the world when we think it belongs to us.

I really enjoyed Feed Them Silence.
I absolutely loved the authors previous work, Summer Sons.
So i was really excited to read this book!
I ended up really enjoying it and it was a great sci-fi novella.
I highly recommend it!
Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

This near-future literary sci-fi has a powerful arc for its tight novella length. Mandelo successfully brings the reader into the protagonist’s mind and into their imperfect motivations. Anyone who has worked in research academia will recognize the dogged commitment to grant-work, for better or worse. As the protagonist grapples with her roles—wife, scientist, steward—the readers is invited to empathize with the siloes of society today and the burden of seeking stasis across our commitments.

Lee Mandelo’s debut, Summer Sons, immediately launched him to my auto-read/buy list and when Feed Them Silence was first announced, I was so incredibly excited. Academia devolving to madness at the detriment of everything else in your life paired with Mandelo’s uniquely evocative wordplay is so absolutely my genre of book that I couldn’t not love this.

Word on the street (Twitter) says this book has rancid vibes. Naturally in my mind, rancid == erotic horror. Do not make the same mistake as me. While the (kinda) wolf-fucking is there, it is (tragically) brief. Instead, rancid in this case means you will be stuck with a lot of sad and unpleasant thoughts upon finishing this book, contemplating if you, too, are somehow ruining close partnerships, your career, and all other friendships in the pursuit of the unachievable dreams. Because damn this book takes you places you’re definitely not prepared to go and it does not let up.

Mandelo spends a line dissing roboticists, so in defense of my profession, I feel obligated to point out that the communications range implanted in a wolf allowed to roam in the wild(!!) and the capacity of data it is able to transmit seems very sus. But that’s okay, because this story is really about losing everything and everyone else around you.

Really, the moral of this story is to stick with government funding. Don’t be fooled by the allure of corporate money.

Overall, I rate this book a 5/5. Feed Them Silence has everything I love about the dark academia genre in watching that slippery slope of bad decisions in the name of research while slowly watching relationships around you go wrong. This book will make you feel many many things.

Mandelo is incredibly talented, and this novella just continues to prove that true. This is a quick read, but it's incredibly captivating and interesting. Secondary characters could've benefitted from more development, but there are understandably constraints when writing a novella - I don't think it detracts from the overall writing or enjoyment, though!

This novella packs a mighty punch. Mandelo is able to examine so many themes about human nature. This book is dark but also extremely insightful.

(3.5 stars)

I enjoyed this novella by Lee Mandelo! Their ability to pack so much into just over a hundred pages was very impressive. It was a super quick read, and I was definitely sucked into the story right off the bat.

The overall premise––to create a neural connection between humans and wolves––is a very fascinating one, and one I can see coming true in the future (which made this novella all the more terrifying for me.) I loved Mandelo’s descriptions of what the protagonist was feeling and all of the sensory details during her sessions with her wolf, Kate. It all felt very, very real. I’ve always been interested in media examining the human x animal connection, so I really enjoyed the overlying premise and themes here.

However, I just didn’t find myself truly connecting with any of the characters. As it is only a novella, I wasn’t expecting anything crazy, but I just couldn't get myself to truly care about what they were going through. The protagonist, Sean, is extremely unlikable––which I usually don’t have a problem with––but I think mixed with rather undeveloped secondary characters, I couldn’t find anything I truly connected with in any of the characters.

This is more of a personal preference than a critique, but I wish the story got a bit darker. I would have loved to go deeper into the characters’ psychological consequences of the events of the novels. There is certainly a level of darkness, especially when the themes of conservation and private funding from corporations were addressed. I just wish it felt more unsettling. But this is absolutely a personal preference, and the novella shouldn’t be knocked for this.

It’s pretty astonishing how much Lee Mandelo managed to fit into 112 pages.

In this near future book, Sean leads a privately funded research project where she can neurally interface with one of the last remaining wild wolves. While Sean dives wholly into her work, she further strains her already struggling relationship with her wife.

A college professor once told me that all the best philosophy happens in speculative fiction now, and this is a perfect example of that. In many ways, this is a treatise on capitalism, conservation, empathy and selfishness. And yet, it’s still very accessible and readable. It moved quickly but packs an emotional punch.

This is going to sound awful, but I’m not really an animal person. Often, I find books with animals as primary characters boring: I just can't get into them. But this held my interest the whole time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor!

The only thing that kept me from really enjoying this book a lot more was all of the academic talk and language that was used. I kept getting pulled out of the story multiple times to try and decipher what was being said and the implications behind it. Maybe this book was just too smart for me but I had to slow my reading pace down drastically to even interpret what was happening.

This novella is exactly the kind of thing I’ve come to expect from Lee Mandelo, while also being unexpected enough to be impossible to stop thinking about. It’s unsettling and just a little bit screwed up, and yet that’s why it’s so good. Indelibly queer, with a middle-aged butch lesbian for the main character and a number of other queer characters throughout, though it’s not the primary focus of the story. It looks beyond traditional relationships, instead delving into a craving for belonging and intimacy blanketed by the ominous shadow of venture capitalist technology. Rife with feeling without any sort of appeasement, I very much recommend.

Several adjectives come to mind while thinking about this book: unsettling, discordant, ominous, off-kilter, etc. And when it comes to FEED THEM SILENCE, those are good things. There’s something very raw about Lee Mandelo’s books, as if something is reaching inside of me, not to pull out something perfectly preserved, but bloody and very much not supposed to be outside of the body. Still, it’s incredibly human, even if we can’t relate to trying to neurally connect to an endangered wolf. This is all used to SILENCE’s advantage, creating an incredible atmosphere that exists beyond the page.

Even though this is a novella, it manages to not only feel like a whole and complete story, but as if it could have been longer than what it actually was. A wealth of story is packed into it, with intense characterization that drives the story, even as our main character doesn’t have all the information. The plot is understated, instead coming through more as the feeling that things can’t turn out exactly how we want them to. Pairing all that with writing that is point-blank and aching with emotion, and I truly could not put this book down.

For fans of Mandelo’s work, of books that are queer but not pretty, and those who have a craving for intimacy and nature, I wholeheartedly recommend this. And I won’t be forgetting about Sean, or Kate, anytime soon.

At first, I struggled with this novel, because I could not suspend my disbelief with the premise. The technology that allows Sean to experience the mind of a wolf is brand-new, as in she is the first human subject. A wild animal? Wild-wild, not even zoo-wild.
Soon enough though, I fell into the world of the story and real-world logic stopped mattering and the story-logic made sense. Shady private funding hoping to exploit dying species using VR is absolutely plausible.
This is a deeply engrossing, slightly depressing story of “catastrophic selfishness” as one character puts it. Sean is desperate for connection, and thinks she will find it via her neural link with the wolf. However, as in all her relationships, Sean takes but does not willingly give. Even as she acknowledges her hubris and culpability, Sean is still seeking to justify, to remain the hero of her story.
I thought this would be a “woman finds power in going feral” book, but it’s about invasive entitlement and destructive desire.
Recommended

A novella about having a neural link into the mind of a wolf? I couldn't wait to read this. As a sci-fi, popular science, and nature literature reader this had the potential to majorly disappoint, but it solidly did not. The developing connection between the researcher and the wolf was well thought out and clearly based in trying to understand wolf and pack behavior. The building emotional connection and the tension of 'how far will this go' kept me running back to the book with every free minute. The underlying story of the researcher and her wife's marital problems provide contrast to the building relationship with the wolf and the research team. This story/plot was perfect for the novella length. Be warned, the researcher is not a likeable character in many respects. But her connection to the wolf is so well written, you empathize with her as she empathizes with the wolf. I will be recommending this to sci-fi readers and those interested in nature writing, animal behavior, and popular psychology. If you have a reader that is particularly sensitive to animals being harmed, they may want to avoid this title. Nothing out of the ordinary for wolf behavior, but they are carnivores.

Thanks a lot for the ARC!
This was such an absolute SLAY of a book and such a textured, rich read. The prose is FANTASTIC. I have nothing but top notch compliments and praise for it!

This is a novella that packs a punch. Lee Mandelo does a great work with narrative tension as always, and I basically inhaled this novel as we watched Sean fall deeper and deeper into the study and struggle to maintain her marriage and sense of self. It's a very compelling look at intimacy that has a lot to say, and does so successfully in an impressively thin volume that will definitely stay with you. I would recommend to readers looking for literary, speculative science fiction with deeply flawed, deeply human characters.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of this title in exchange for an honest review.

I read wolf books as a kid, ones that I read and reread, that stuck with me as a reader - first, <b>Julie of the Wolves</b>, then I graduated to <b>Wolf-Speaker</b> - and last year’s <b>Once We Were Wolves</b> has lingered with me like a ghost, a haunting. I don’t think it’s fair to <I>compare</i> books in some ways (and not fair to compare a book in any way to the spectre that is <b>Once We Were Wolves</b>) but I wanted to establish a baseline for the following statement, on top of my well-documented swooning over Lee Mandelo’s previous work, <b>Summer Sons</b>: there was no chance that I would not like this book.

One of the many things that grabs me about Lee Mandelo’s writing is their ability to write in such a visceral way that wallops you with its emotion. Look, I’m nowhere near as good with words as them, so I’ll put it plainly: their writing always makes me FEEL. And sure, some of the feeling this time was exasperation and dread and stop making the singularly worst decisions you can, won’t you, Sean? But the point is, this is writing that draws me in.

This was tightly laid out, and while I don’t feel like it’s necessarily missing anything in novella form, I think, for me, novel-length wouldn’t have been a bad thing. One thing that stood out to me is this growing sense of almost claustrophobia, like the walls were slowly coming together around me, and while more pages would mean more of that uncomfortable feeling, as Sean undoubtedly would use those extra pages to continue down her path of choosing the worst fork in every road, that is a sacrifice I would be willing to make.

All in all, yes, I <b>will</b> be stalking future Lee Mandelo releases with a fervour, thank you.

[arc review]
Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review.
Feed Them Silence releases March 14/2023

“What did it mean, to make history?”

The premise of this was so intriguing. I think everyone at one point has given thought to what it would be like to truly communicate with non-human animals on the same wavelength, or even embody living life from their perspective.

In Feed Them Silence — Dr. Sean Kell-Luddon neurologically connects with one of the last remaining wild wolves.
Not only was this focused on the scientific research of wolves, but it also incorporated home-life-marriage dynamics, which I really liked.
Lines blurred between seeking connection from immediate loved ones, or from another species altogether, as well as the ethics of the whole situation.
The counter arguments made by Sean’s wife, Riya, held a lot of weight, and I loved the introspective thoughts that their characters brought to the plot.
The parasocial relationship between Sean and Kate, the wolf, was one of the most interesting things I’ve read. In my eyes, it was inevitable for them to form a more than surface level connection and chemical change that quickly reached out of bounds of what the funders of this research project intended.

“You’re chasing another creature to give you the intimacy you’re craving, a being that can’t reciprocate your desire the way Riya can and has.”

For a novella, this was very well rounded and packed a punch.
The ending leaves for a lot of reflection.
I think this would translate well to screen!

- sci-fi novella
- interracial F/F marriage
- they/them pronouns
- set in 2031
- does include cheating