Author: Rae Mariz
Publisher: Harper Collins
Rating: WARTY!
Errata:
p134 "Eating these are even better than the hype." should be "Eating these is even better than the hype."
p256 "DIY Deopt" should be "DIY Depot"
I had a lot of mixed feelings reading this, but in the end, I decided that for an assortment of reasons, I cannot rate this as a worthy read.
This novel is yet another YA first person PoV told by a female, and normally I hate these, but in this case, it's different enough that it's not even irritating that it's told in FPoV. See? It can be done! I just wish more YA authors could figure it out, but more than that I wish they could figure out that you can tell a story in third person and not be arrested for it. This is speculative rather than dystopian, so that was a pleasant change, too, but from there onwards, it was rather downhill.
The story starts out really slowly. Far too slowly; it takes forever for anything to happen and even when it does, it feels like nothing is happening. Some editing would have made a noticeable difference there, but even that couldn't have saved what was, in the end, a flat and limited story.
It's set in the future of course, and it's related by a fifteen-year-old named Katey Dade, whose school network handle is "Kid". Her mother addresses her as 'Kiddie' which is not only demeaning, it's really annoying. The school network is where life happens even as the students attend classes very much like today's students do. This school doesn't mind texting - indeed, it encourages it, because the sponsors use the network to push sponsored events and challenges.
This school isn't like any high school you've ever attended. It's a mall which has been converted into a school and which is now completely sponsored by corporations. The students' entire day revolves around working towards becoming a really good corporate drone. Students have to work their way through school by showing what they can contribute to business plans, come up with inventions, engage in trend-setting and produce new ideas in advertising, and if they're really lucky, they can become sponsored themselves - which is the sign that you've arrived in the big time. Or is it so lucky after all?
Kid doesn't think so, and rather than cultivate huge "friends" networks and pursue corporate sponsorship and agendas, she's happy to be a really average student and genuine friends with only two people: Aria (like Maria without the 'M') with whom she's been close friends forever, but who turns slowly into every bit as big of a bitch as the recognized school bitches, and Mikey, the standard trope loser guy who is best friends with the girl but who never gets her (trust me, he doesn't want her - not if he's smart).
One morning at school Kid witnesses what she thinks is a suicide or a murder, but it turns out it was nothing but a stunt - a dummy pushed over a balcony carrying a message signed by "The unidentified". This is the first problem - that in a busy school watched over by corporate big Brother, no one saw the people setting up this stunt. I simply did not buy that. It wasn't credible.
Kid takes a real interest in who pulled off this stunt and why, and it's her very interest in this which undermines her "plan" to stay corporately anonymous. A security corporation offers her sponsorship, and begins taking a real interest in her - as does hot guy Jeremy Swift, who is also (very conveniently) sponsored by this same security business.
Mariz tries hard to distinguish her writing and give it a sufficiently futuristic look and feel, and for the most part she succeeds, although at times she tries too hard and it falls flat. I mean is it really necessary to put the registered trademark logo after the word 'notebook' every single time she uses it? Mariz apparently doesn't know that you can't trademark a commonly-used word like that.
Everyone has a notebook, and everyone has an 'InTouch' device - her word for a cell phone. Why the two are separate I have no idea. That seemed to me to be a failure in her futuristic planning. There is a definite feel of George Orwell's 1984 to this novel, and some reviewers compared it with Jennifer Government and Feed which I've also reviewed - and negatively. This is something which isn't so far-fetched that you could never imagine it happening, so it has that going for it, too.
The big problem for me was Kid herself, as the main character. She offered nothing to make herself stand out as a main character worth reading about. She was average all the way, which was the real problem. As such she wasn't a shaker and a mover. She didn't initiate things. Things happened around her, which she observed and related, but she was not actor. She was an actee, a narrator, rather like the oddly redundant sports commentators, who make a career out of doing nothing more than simply telling you what you're seeing. How bizarre is that?
When Kid actually has a chance to shine, she fails. The worst of these instances came during an Unidentified "event", the leader of The Unidentified, someone Kid knows, starts beating-up on Mikey, her best (male) friend, and she does nothing! She doesn't help Mikey directly, nor does she film the attack for use as evidence later. All she does is what she's done the whole novel: stand and narrate (oh, and keep asking "Why are you doing this?" - something which she fails to figure out for herself). Afterwards she continues to pursue the leader guy as though he's her friend, too. She harbors not a shred of anger or resentment towards him.
Another example is when her best friend betrays her and she's completely unmoved emotionally. It just did not ring true, not for a fifteen-year-old. Kid is as cold and plastic as you can get. She would be an ideal corporate drone, and that's the real problem with this story. She's a poseur - presented as a rebel or as an anti-establishment figure, or even as a revolutionary, when she's precisely the opposite. She's a milquetoast, just like Walter Mitty, but she's nowhere near as entertaining.
Contrary to what the blurb says (blurbs nearly always lie, don't they?) Kid doesn't make things happen. She doesn't take charge. She doesn't even come up with good ideas or plans. She doesn't plan and she has no idea. This would have made a much better short story than ever it did a full-length novel.
