Baron produces a novel that feels based on adult assumptions regarding teens’ use of Facebook; it will likely appeal only to...
A ghost-story wannabe for the digital age.
Jason Moreland likes alternative bands and ’80s movies, so perhaps it’s not surprising that the girls at his high school just aren’t into him. But when he gets a message back from Lacey Gray, a random Facebook friend, he discovers the girl of his dreams online. When a casual Internet search turns up memorial pages and obituaries, Jason worries Lacey might be too cool for him—literally. Jason decides to investigate Lacey’s life and death, using the messages Lacey is apparently sending from beyond the grave. Baron’s near-manic mentions of social media and technology quickly become tiresome and only serve to jar the narrative flow away from the breakneck action pace. Jason has very little personality—a bland protagonist indistinguishable from the generic Everyteen semihero. Given the numerous incidents of social media hacking in the real world, it stretches credulity that Jason accepts a paranormal explanation instead of suspecting a hijack attempt. The pages are populated by unsympathetic characters who feel as shallow as the promoted posts on a newsfeed.
Baron produces a novel that feels based on adult assumptions regarding teens’ use of Facebook; it will likely appeal only to the disconnected adult gift-giver with no sense of teen reading taste. (Horror. 12-16)Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-42357-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Point Horror
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
Hooked readers will be tapping their fingers waiting for the sequel.
Reichs follows up his Virals series (co-written with his mother, Kathy Reichs) with a new series about imminent human extinction.
Min is not your average 16-year-old. Living in a trailer park in an isolated town high in the mountains of Idaho, she’s learned to keep pretty much to herself. She has a mother who loves her and a best friend, Tack, who’d like to be more, but she knows they can’t understand what she’s going through. Every two years on her birthday, she’s murdered. And every two years she comes back, completely unharmed. She’s tried to escape the inevitable but knows it’s only a matter of time before the man in black returns for her. Now things are getting worse, with an asteroid headed toward Earth. Will this be it, the real end of her life? Just when she’s found that classmate Noah is having the same strange experiences she’s tried to keep hidden? Reichs varies his narrative structure, opening with Min’s present-day account, interspersed with italicized flashbacks, and then switching to Noah, whose account is punctuated by transcripts with the doctor he shares with Min, before their stories converge in alternating chapters. It’s a pacing strategy that keeps the pages flipping madly. Min, Tack, and Noah are all evidently white.
Hooked readers will be tapping their fingers waiting for the sequel. (Thriller. 12-16)Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-54493-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Slow off the mark and gratuitously violent but cooking with (nerve) gas by the end.
With help from a reclusive billionaire, teen supersoldiers tackle a cyberterrorist in this sequel to Camp Valor (2018).
The main suspense comes from wondering when the chases and firefights are finally going to start. Traumatized by the discovery that he’s been duped into mowing down a crowd of real pedestrians in what he thought was a virtual truck, online gamer Jalen Rose is recruited by Valorian agent and co-protagonist Wyatt to join him in an unauthorized mission to find the instigator, Encyte. There are suspects aplenty. Their patron, tech tycoon John Darsie, points them toward one possibility: his own employee Julie Chen, a brilliant (not to mention “tough and a little boyish, but cute”) 14-year-old gamer and software designer. Despite a series of cyber exploits, including a high-casualty riot fueled by pheromones, there are so many distracting subplots—notably the hunt for a traitor from the first volume, the arrival of a government official who orders the camp shut down because she can’t see the value of a cadre of secretly trained child warriors (go figure), and a developing relationship between Jalen and Julie—that the pedal doesn’t really hit the metal until some time after the real villain makes a tardy first entrance. Jalen is African American and Wyatt is white.
Slow off the mark and gratuitously violent but cooking with (nerve) gas by the end. (Paramilitary thriller. 12-16)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-08825-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
