SEBASTIAN AND THE CHARACTER HACKER

Day’s third novel about a smart but shy New York City boy finds its hero involved with a group of vigilante computer hackers.

Thirteen-year-old Sebastian Kemp is in a bad place. To prove his innocence in a cheating scam, he tried to hack his school’s computer system—and was caught, expelled, and sent to the “110 percent awful” Berkowitz High, full of kids who “bombed out” of other schools. The place isn’t all bad: Sebastian is welcomed by 15-year-old Jazmin, who has a baby daughter, and by Marty, a wannabe actor who enrolled because of the school’s theater program. But he’s terrorized by Sammy the Psycho, a bully who demands that Sebastian help him cheat on a math quiz. Unwilling to do it, Sebastian instead seeks out the Totos—a group of teenage runaways–turned–computer hackers who operate from an abandoned train car beneath Grand Central Terminal. Sebastian learns to hack and hopes to protect himself by digging up dirt on Sammy the Psycho. He finds himself empowered by the Totos’ righteous vigilantism, but is he being drawn into something more nefarious? As the answer emerges, Sebastian is confronted by teen pregnancy and homelessness, police corruption, and the insidious practice of grooming potential victims of abuse. He’s a likable protagonist—young for his age but good-hearted and nonjudgmental—and the other characters evince real personality. Day writes in the first person, present tense, narrating with a prose style that gives easy access to Sebastian’s thoughts and feelings, and the well-paced plot rattles along and avoids predictability. Some readers may quibble with how easily Sebastian becomes a master hacker, but even this fits in with the authorial injunction for readers not to be too readily accepting. Younger readers of this novel will learn, as Sebastian does, that problems rarely have easy solutions—and if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

A well-wrought cautionary tale that’s fast-moving and full of surprises.