The Plague! The Plague! Someone Save Us!

The Comet's Curse by Dom Testa
3Q 3P; Audience: M/J

When the comet Bhaktul flits through Earth's atmosphere, it leaves universally fatal death-dealing particles behind. It won't be long until everyone is dead. Is there any chance that a cure will be found before that happens? Is there any chance the civilization can be saved? With the scientists and doctors dying, it looks unlikely. But Dr. Wallace Zimmer isn't willing to take no for an answer to either question. The virus doesn't affect people until they turn eighteen. If he can put together the right group of kids and get them away from Earth, perhaps they'll be able to find the way to defeat the virus and Earth's civilization. After an intensive search and training period, 251 of Earth's brightest teenagers are sent into space to colonize Eos, a new planet. It will take years for them to arrive and create a new life for themselves. But if they make it, they'll have beaten Bhaktul and Earth will, in some way, have survived.

The crew is carefully chosen for their intelligence, physical fitness, and emotional stability. They are carefully and rigorously trained for the formidable task ahead of them. The Galahad has everything they will need for a long space voyage, including farming facilities, living areas, and game and training rooms to keep them physically fit. And they have Roc, their walking (well, almost), talking, wisecracking supercomputer. Yes, they're young. But they're well prepared, brilliant, and ready for anything. Except, perhaps for the stowaway who is threatening to scuttle their mission before they've had a chance to truly begin it.

Musings:

I wanted to like this book, which is the first in the Galahad series. I was prepared to accept the improbability of a bunch of kids being the saviors of civilization. If it's done well, that premise can be exciting reading. But this is not done particularly well. The characters show some promise, but they are not yet fully developed. The story plays out predictably. The identity of the stowaway is not much of a surprise. But my major issue with the book is the lack of subtlety in the writing. For instance, Testa takes great pains to make sure his readers know that the crew is made up of teens of every ethnicity and culture. Here he introduces Gap, one of the five teens who make up the ship's governing council:

Gap thought of his early childhood in China, raised as an only child by his parents, both of whom were college professors. An early interest in gymnastics was fueled by his training with a former Olympic champion...[Then his parents relocated the family to America] And although his parents were concerned about the abrupt change in his life, Gap immediately accepted the challenge of meeting new people and forming new friendships. It seemed everyone warmed to him as soon as they met him...his school grades reflected his obvious intellect. He kept up his training with gymnastics, keeping an eye on that Olympic future.

Okay, we get it. Gap's Chinese, athletic, very intelligent, and very likeable. All of that could have been shown to us instead of told so bluntly. With Lita, the teen in charge of the infirmary, Testa first goes out of his way to tell us her ethnicity, but then he slips the same information in much more naturally. Which is more effective?

"Lita's black eyes and Latin American skin spoke of her upbringing in Mexico."
or, just a few pages later: "her eyes focused on a glass cube that sat atop a folder. The cube was filled with sand and small pebbles, one of the personal items from her home near the beach in Mexico."

Similarly, Testa works awfully hard to make us find Roc amusing:

I, on the other hand, will continue to be the same sophisticated, charming, and witty intellect that I've always been...I've got reserves of charm that I probably won't begin to tap for years. You're very lucky to know me. Don't you feel lucky?

and

...I obviously talk to the crew, I run the life-support systems on the ship, I answer questions, and I have a lovely singing voice. If you're a girl, and I'm a flesh-and-blood boy, you're all over me... You and I have the same information, so we'll both have to puzzle it out. The only difference is that I'm incredibly smart. Not that you aren't, but when you can recite the table of elements in twenty-six languages, get back to me.

I wish he'd just relax and let his characters be instead of having his author's voice be so intrusive.

I do think this series has the potential to be an intriguing read for younger teens who enjoy science fiction. I'm curious to see what Testa has in mind as the trip goes on and the kids first have to decide if they want to keep the same Council leaders and if not, what the fallout to that decision might be and then (and especially) when they land on Eos and have to create their own civilization. Will they try to maintain what they know from Earth, or will they try to build something completely different? What difficulties will they face? And what will they find in those rooms in the storage areas that are so mysteriously locked for the duration of the voyage? And of course, we already have a budding romance and a brooding leader who may spell trouble. What sort of fireworks will result from all that? Will they be the sort that inspire a satisfied "ahhh!" or the kind that makes one run for cover?

Big Brother Is Watching You...What Are You Going to Do About It?

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
4Q 4P? Audience: J/S/Adult

This book won't be everyone's cup of tea, but for readers who are politically-minded and/or love technology and intrigue, it's ::ahem:: the bomb. It is certainly a book cause he won't give up his email passwords. Because he can't believe that the Constitution of the United States no longer protects him.

When Marcus is let out of prison a few days later, he leaves behind one good friend and most of his illusions. He barely recognizes the world he steps into. His laptop has been bugged. The government is tracking people through their debit cards and arphids encoded into transit system passes, so it knows exactly what people are buying and when and where they traveled. Closed circuit cameras are installed in classrooms, businesses, and on public streets. If more than three or four people gather together, the police force them to disperse. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has turned San Francisco into a police state.

Marcus isn't about to lose his civil liberties without a fight. What can one kid do? When you're as smart as Marcus, as technically proficient as Marcus, as scared as Marcus, and as determined as Marcus, you can do plenty. He creates Xnet, an underground computer society that the government can't monitor. Through Xnet, dozens of small acts of rebellion are launched, ranging from simple debates over government policies to disseminating instructions on how to disable arphids so the activities of innocent people can't be tracked. They plan peaceful protest gatherings. And they simply chat, game, and develop friendships and solidarity. When crisis time comes, Marcus is awed by just how powerful his movement has become. The government isn't awed. It's angry. In this battle, who has the stronger army, Marcus or Homeland Security?

Musings:

As I read and after I finished the book, I wondered just how much of the technology that Doctorow describes really exists. That's surely a sign of hooking the reader's imagination and interest. My web surfing proved that I was not the only one to be intrigued, but these guys aren't just wondering. They actually hope to create the Paranoid Linux operating system. Talk about a book making an impact on a reader!(In the book, Paranoid Linux is described thusly:)

*Paranoid Linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by Chinese and Syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. It even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. So while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, ParanoidLinux is pretending to surf the Web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. Meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack.
~Cory Doctorow (Little Brother, 2008)

Doctorow's writing is somewhat uneven. There are some gripping scenes. For instance, Marcus's terror is visceral when he begins to comprehend just how different a government interrogation is from being called to the principal's office. He can't bluff his way out of this, and brashness only makes things worse. Reading this section made me realize just how easily one can be reduced to feeling powerless and too afraid to fight back. However, he occasionally gets too technical, slowing down the narrative. He also repeats himself fairly frequently. I was caught up in the story enough that neither problem stopped me from wanting to read more, but less patient readers may not be able to overlook them as easily. Doctorow also stacks the deck by making almost every character on the side of Homeland Security one-dimensional cardboard villains. I can't help wondering if that's the mark of an overly confident author or one who isn't confident enough.

With questions to debate such as

• Do we sometimes need to give up some freedoms for the sake of a larger goal?
• At what point does civil disobedience become terrorism?
• Is Doctorow too extreme?
• Whether Andrew Huang's afterword on the virtues of computer hacking has merit

this book is an excellent choice for classrooms and book discussion groups.

If you like this book, you might also enjoy Hacking Harvard by Robin Wasserman. The setup: Can three accomplished hackers get a totally unqualified student accepted to Harvard? The stakes are high (higher than some of them know), but if they can pull this off, it'll be one of the greatest hacks in history. I recommend it to readers in high school and beyond.

Reading Roundup, Part Two

Here are a couple of books I had high hopes for when I started them. Unfortunately, I think neither of them quite holds up to their early promise. But your mileage may vary.

The Chaos Code by Justin Richards
3Q 3P; Audience: M/J

When Matt Stribling's mother breaks the news to him that he's going to be spending his vacation with his father, rather than at home with her, he's not happy. His dad is a nice guy, but he's so busy with his archaeological work that he barely pays attention to Matt. Sure enough, when Matt arrives at the train station, Dad's not there. But Dad's not at home, either, and little by little, Matt comes to the conclusion that something is seriously wrong. Maybe it's the mess (but Dad's place is always a mess). Maybe it's the sandy footprints leading through Dad's office and out onto the lawn. Maybe it's the rough, sandy fingers he feels closing over his face and cutting off his air until he passes out. Or maybe it's the missing mail that was on the floor when he arrived and wasn't there just a few hours later. Or maybe it's the coded letter from his father, telling him to go to his Aunt Jane's and to worry if he doesn't hear from him soon. Or maybe it's all of the above.

When Matt heads to his Aunt Jane's, he has no idea that he will soon be meeting some of the richest and most ruthless men in the world, or that he will soon be swept up in an adventure that will find him in remote jungles and ancient pyramids, and threatened by advanced technology he couldn't have imagined existed. He isn't facing these things alone, of course. Aunt Jane works for multimillionaire collector Julius Venture, and Venture has a daughter, Robin. They are just the kind of people you want on your side when things get tense. But that doesn't mean that Venture and Robin don't have significant secrets of their own. Can Matt and Robin stop what seems inevitable? They hope so, because the fate of the entire world depends on their doing just that.

I was hoping that the book would continue in the same vein in which it started, with Matt having to decode various puzzles and clues as he gets closer and closer to discovering what happened to his father. Instead, the book is more of a cat-and-mouse game, with lots of action (which is a good thing) and chases. But I felt the whys and hows of what was going on got muddled. It felt as though the author hoped that if he threw enough things into the pot, his readers wouldn't really notice that the recipe isn't quite as filling as it ought to be. I had a few too many "Didn't you already say that?" and "I didn't quite get what you were going for there" moments as I read. I'd also have appreciated a more nuanced villain and fewer lucky coincidences. But perhaps that's just me. Readers who like a lot of action and suspense may not care or notice those things as much as I did.


Bunker 10 by J. A. Henderson
3Q 3P; Audience: J

At 2000 hours on Monday, 24 December 2007, Pinewood Military Installation exploded. The blast ripped apart acres of forest and devastated the remote highland valley where the base was located. There were no survivors and no official cause was given for the incident. Inside Pinewood were 185 male and female military personnel -- a mix of scientists and soldiers. There were also 7 children. This is the story of their last day.

Okay, a story can't open with much more of a grabber than that.

Pinewood is a secret military installation. Very few people know what goes on there, and even fewer people know that the seven children in the installation aren't ordinary kids. Each of them is a genius, and each has an ability that the army prizes highly. As a result, they have each been conned, coerced, or invited to work at Pinewood, with the understanding that they will join the military when they turn eighteen. In the meantime, they study, work on their own special projects (time travel is a big draw), and follow the dictates of those in command. Those officers haven't gone out of their way to make the school particularly comfortable or welcoming to the kids. That they aren't allowed to go home for Christmas is a pretty good indication that their choice to come to Pinewood wasn't the best decision they ever made. The rules are strict, the barracks are barren, and their life is about their studies. Given the situation, it's not surprising that a couple of the kids are ready to break loose. All Jimmy and Leslie want is go on a simple date. Off campus. It's all fairly innocent, really, as far as treason goes.

Getting off the base involves jamming signals and locks (for these kids, that's child's play) and otherwise deceiving their military guards. What Jimmy, Lesley, and the other kids don't realize is that they aren't the only ones who have secret plans. Messing around with the security system might not have been such a great idea. The plans of the others are potentially a whole lot deadlier than sneaking out for a date.

Lieutenant Dunwoody and his special teams force are on their way to Pinewood. All Dunwoody knows is that he is being sent to a facility that specializes in advanced virtual reality technology (all the better to train soldiers in combat techniques) as well as things like three-dimensional mapping, biohazards, and alternative fuel resources. But those are not his concern. His concern is whatever is in the lower levels of Pinewood, an area so highly classified that nobody will tell him what it is he's about to encounter.

The third group prowling around Pinewood this Christmas Eve consists of Sherman, a virtual reality simulation specialist who works for the military; Madrid, a tall, athletic woman sent from High Command; Darren, a computers and electronics whiz kid; and Nulce. What does Nulce do? He kills people.

While Jimmy, Lesley, and the other kids are concentrating on their date, Dunwoody and Sherman's teams are about to learn about Bunker 10. What's in the super-secret Bunker 10? May-Rose. May-Rose used to be just one of the kids. Not anymore. May-Rose has...evolved. And if she breaks out of Bunker 10, the world is going to regret it. She must be stopped at all costs. At any cost.

Believe me, the costs are high (as if you couldn't tell, given how the book begins). This is a book for readers who like gore, violence, and mayhem. It also requires readers who have the patience for discussions about time travel, virtual reality, genetic manipulation and the like, as well as the ability to follow several storylines at once. One of the storylines has a neat little twist/premise that I don't want to spoil. Suffice it to say that it will leave you wondering what's really going on. Some readers will like that. Some won't. One aspect of the book that I found problematical was a mention that each of the kids in the story supposedly have the traits of various despots of the past. I spent a fair amount of time trying to identify those traits and looking for similarities with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc., but I wasn't successful. It bothered me that that was presented but not (or poorly) followed through. If it wasn't important to the story, why mention it? (I do have a guess about that, but I don't like that answer.) If it was important, why wasn't it more developed? I was bothered even more (because it's constant) by the jive talking of Dave, one of the teens. I found it utterly unconvincing and increasingly irritating. I'm sure it was an attempt to individualize him, but the end result for me was a character that seemed fake rather than authentic. Other characters, including Lesley, May-Rose, and the colonel, are either barely developed or essentially play the same note throughout. Characterization is not the strong point of this novel.

Ultimately, I found Bunker 10 disappointing. It has an intriguing premise and a terrific start. Henderson is excellent at ratcheting up the tension and keeping the action going. But I found the parts more coherent than the whole, with the "what it's all about" ultimately confusing and unconvincing. However, readers who like a thrill ride of a read may be willing to overlook things that I could not.

A Person or a Thing?

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson
4Q 3P J/S

(Apparently, Blogger's scheduling option doesn't always work. This was supposed to be auto-posted a couple of weeks ago.)

Is it possible to be loved too much?

What makes a person a person?

Just because you can do something, does that mean you should?

Jenna Fox has been in a coma for a year. When she wakes up, she doesn't remember who she is. She doesn't know even the simplest words, and her mind can't grasp concepts like time. She doesn't know how to read the expressions on people's faces anymore. She can't walk, and she can't talk. She makes amazing progress, though. It only takes a couple of days before she can talk and walk around. Her memory is still spotty, though. She can quote whole pages from books, but she can't remember who this person she's supposed to call Mother is. She doesn't remember her father, either, or her grandmother, Lily. Even worse, she doesn't remember herself. She has to watch video discs to learn that she excelled at ballet or see what a happy family they used to be. And there are plenty of discs to watch - one for every year of her life, right up until her accident. Every moment of her life was chronicled by her doting parents.

Those vids were of her life back in Boston. But only her father lives there now. Jenna, her mother, and Lily are out in California, living in a house that seems empty and unfinished. As hard as her mother tries to make everything seem normal, things just don't seem quite right. For one thing, Jenna doesn't need to know how to read expressions to know that her grandmother doesn't like her. What could she possibly have done to make Lily dislike her so much? And why does their neighbor tell Jenna that they've only been in the house for a couple of weeks, when she's sure they must have lived there for a couple of years? Why does she keep having dreams about her two best friends, and why doesn't she have any get well notes or calls from them? Why does her mother get so uptight whenever Jenna tries to leave the house? And why are there locked rooms behind the closets?

When Jenna discovers the answer to the last question, everything begins to fall shockingly into place. And then Jenna discovers the shocking truth that her parents have hidden from her. She begins to question her own existence. Who is she? What is she? And should she be at all?

Science has made our lives easier. It's enabled us to explore space. It's helped us to live longer and healthier lives. But can science go too far? At what point does helpful science turn harmful? And just because something is possible, does that mean it should be done?

Quote:

(Jenna's poems appear throughout the book. This is one of them.)

Pieces

A bit for someone here.
A bit there.
And sometimes they don't add up to anything whole.
but you are so busy dancing.
Delivering.
You don't have time to notice.
Or are afraid to notice.
And then one day you have to look.
And it's true.
All of your pieces fill up other people's holes.
But they don't fill
your own.

It's a Runescape Kind of World

EPIC by Conor Kostick
4Q 5P J/M

The teens here are Runescape fanatics. Battleon used to be really popular too. I've been known to play both. When I was younger, I loved the Zork games (boy, does that date me!) and any other adventure game that centered around solving puzzles (as opposed to the ones that feature endless battles). There's something about these games that's addicting and exciting. But what if you had to play? And what if everything you did in the game affected your real life? If you are a sixtieth level warrior with +20 magical weapons and armor, you're golden. In the real world, you'd have enough points to have a pretty good life. But what if you meet a stronger foe with better weapons and more magic? Well, then you die and wind up back as a level one character with maybe a rusty dagger and a leather arm guard to protect you as you scramble to kill anything weaker than you are just to gain a paltry coin or two. Now real life's not nearly such a picnic, because you've lost all your assets there, too. Welcome to Erik's world.

In Erik's world, everything depends on how well you play the virtual reality game called Epic. As the book begins, Erik is supposed to be preparing for what seems to be the equivalent of his final exams. But that doesn't mean cracking the books. It means he has to get online and play Epic to hone his skills and improve his stats. That may sound like fun to us, but to Erik, it's no fun at all, particularly because he knows it's an exercise in frustration. The game is stacked against them. Erik, his mother, and his father are, like everyone else in their village, struggling to meet their quotas and fill their duties in the real world. But in order to do that, they need things they can only get by winning in Epic. And that just isn't going to happen. In fact, it's so impossible that they're about to be reallocated and sent to work in the mines. So instead of preparing for the graduation tournament, Erik is trying to find a way to challenge Central Allocations, the governing body that decides who gets what. A successful challenge is the only way the family will be able to stay where they are. Unfortunately, his characters keep dying.

This last death is the final straw. He has to play, yes. But he's through with playing the game by the rules; he's through with playing strategically. His new character will be different from anything he's ever created before. For one thing, she'll be female. And instead of maximizing all the typical skills, such as fighting or crafts, and instead of trying to get as much magic and the best weapons he can afford, in a moment of whimsy he decides to throw all his attribute points into his character's physical features. She's beautiful. In a game where all the players are gray, angular blobs, Cindella the swashbuckler is going to really stand out.

Stand out she does. The very first time Erik plays Epic as Cindella, he realizes that everything has changed. For the first time ever, the NPCs (the characters controlled by the game, not other players) interact meaningfully with him. In fact, sometimes they even initiate conversations, which is unheard of. But what they tell him is even more amazing. It seems that there's a treasure to be found. If Cindella can find the treasure, she'll be rich. And if she's rich, then Erik is, too.

Erik soon realizes that this is the character that just might survive long enough to be able to mount that challenge against Central Allocations. But if Cindella wants to find that treasure, she's going to need some help. And Erik is going to need help, too. Fortunately, Erik has four very good friends in Bjorn, Injeborg, Big Erik, and Sigrid. Together, they make a formidable team, becoming famous throughout Epic and in the real world. But are they good enough and strong enough to beat Central Allocations, the most powerful people/players in both worlds? They had better be, because Central Allocations doesn't like its power threatened, and the council members are prepared to take whatever steps necessary to make sure that Erik and his friends are put in their proper place. In a world where even the merest hint of violence is outlawed, all disputes are supposed to be solved inside the game of Epic and only through tournament combat. But certain members of Central Allocations think rules are for other people. Erik might not know it yet, but his life is in danger, and not just in the game.

Epic has all the elements of a great role-playing game adventure: a quest, villains, vampires, ogres, trolls, a truly fearsome dragon, treachery, magic, and ::ahem:: epic battles. Some characters turn out to have secrets that have a huge impact in the way the story (book and Epic) turn out. In a sense, this is two treats in one. It's a great read, and at the same time, there are sections when it manages to make you feel as though you truly are participating in the virtual reality world.

I highly recommend this book to teens who like action and adventure. Even kids who are more interested in playing on their computers than in reading will enjoy this one. And when teachers assign their students to read a science fiction novel, this will be one of my first suggestions to the kids who hate science fiction. I think they'll be pleasantly surprised.

The author is planning to write at least one sequel/companion novel to Epic. In fact, I see that it's already been published in the United Kingdom and Germany. I'm glad to see that it doesn't seem to be precisely a sequel, because I don't really think it needs one. (But it does seem as though at least 80% of J/YA fantasies and a significant percentage of J/YA science fiction come with "sequel" or "trilogy" written into the contract!). But sequel, companion novel, or stand-alone novel, I will be buying it for my library.

No quotes this time, because it's not a book that particularly lends itself to that. But here are a few links that might be worth checking out:

• Conor Costick News, maintained by a friend of Conor's
• Never Jam Today: Don't take my word for it. Here's a 14-year-old's review.
• Your Friendly Librarian: And another librarian speaks
  

Too Smart for Anyone's Good

I've got a backlog of books to blog about, so I'm going to do some (hopefully) shorter posts about them to help myself catch up. Here's the first:

Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks
4Q 4P, J

Cadel Piggott is a genius. If you're astute and you've read the title of the book, you rightly assume that he is an evil genius. But it's not completely his fault. After all, what would you expect a kid to be when, after getting arrested for hacking into computers at the age of seven, he is brought to a child psychologist who tells him that his one big mistake was getting caught? As it turns out, the psychologist, Dr. Roth, is a bit of an evil genius himself. Or at least, he's evil, and he's the go-between for Cadel and another evil genius: Cadel's real father. Cadel's father, Dr. Phineas Darkkon, is in jail for various nefarious plans. But his biggest nefarious plan is one the authorities can't stop: he plans to educate and train people with superior abilities (like Cadel) and help them take over the world.

Over the years, Dr. Roth and Dr. Darkkon guide Cadel as he goes through school honing his talent for lying, manipulating, and plotting, as well as developing his computer hacking skills. (He uses all of these skills in developing an online dating service that winds up being significant for many reasons.) Finally, at the age of fourteen, he is ready to enroll in his father's Axis Institute to be trained in the arts necessary for world domination. His courses include Basic Lying, Pure Evil, Embezzlement, Contagion, and Assassination.

Up to this point, Cadel has had no problem with his father's plans for him. But the Axis Institute isn't for the faint of heart. Tortured screams echo the halls, classes are disrupted by deadly explosions, and blood frequently drips from the ceilings, fellow students die (horribly) or mysteriously disappear, and the faculty is deeply suspicious of each other and their students. Even for Cadel, it's all a bit too much and he begins to wonder if being an evil genius is all it's cracked up to be.

I'm going to recommend this one to kids who like the Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl books, with a few caveats. This one is a lot longer than those books, and it doesn't have as humorous a tone. But it does have a kid-as-criminal-mastermind theme, and the kid is every bit as interesting as Artemis is. I think it's more complex than the Artemis Fowl books, and it's certainly darker in tone and theme. I know elementary school kids like the Artemis Fowl books as much as middle school readers do, but I think Evil Genius is better suited to Artemis's older readers, as well as readers who don't mind a book where the action moves a little more slowly. I think I might also suggest this book to teens who have enjoyed Muchamore's C.H.E.R.U.B. books and Butcher's Spy Highseries. I've just read a few reviews that compare this book to Harry Potter, too, primarily because it involves a young boy who gets sent to a school to get trained to use his talents. I think this one has a different feel from Harry Potter, though I'm sure there will be some overlap in readers.

Don't Be Rash! (But read it!)

Rash by Pete Hautman
4Q 3?P J/S


Let's jump ahead about seventy years, shall we? Let's check out the situation in the good old USSA. Because of things like the Child Safety Act of 2033, protective gear is all the rage. You don't just wear a helmet when you're biking, you wear it when you're running track, too. In fact, you might just wear it pretty much all the time, possibly along with knee and elbow pads. You can never be too safe. What sorts of things can get you in trouble with the law, even thrown in jail? Owning large dogs. Driving without a safety web. Body piercings and tattoos. Drinking alcohol. Littering. Road rage. Not taking your medication (which you take to control your moods). Not wearing your safety gear. Throwing a pencil. Shoving someone against the wall. Verbally attacking someone's physical appearance. Guess how many of those things our hero, Bo, has done? Too many.

Bo blames his troubles on his Marsten genes. His proof: five members of his family are serving time. Bo's about to make it six. You see, Bo is crazy about a girl named Maddy. They've been dating for a while, but lately she's been showing some interest in Karlohs, a guy Bo can't stand, so he desperately wants to impress her. Maybe breaking the school's record (13.3 seconds) for the 100-meter dash will do it. Unfortunately, Karlohs destroys him in the race. To make things worse, Bo loses his temper and verbally assaults Karlohs after the race. Dissing someone is a serious offense, and Bo already has two strikes against him, one for throwing that afore-mentioned pencil and one for a shoving incident. Because of the "three strikes and you're out" policy, he's teetering on the brink of being sent to prison. Then Karlohs comes down with a rash, and blames Bo for it. When the rash spreads to other students, Bo is put on home quarantine. Just when Bo thinks things can't get any worse, it does. He winds up in a fist fight with Karlohs at a local mall. That does it. It's jail time for another Marsten male. Bo soon finds himself way, way up north, in a prison run by McDonald's. (Prisons in the 2070s are run by major companies, such as McDonald's and Pepsi. The country's entire labor force comes from the prison system.) Bo is in for a rude shock. The guards use physical abuse! They verbally assault the prisoners! There are unprotected hard surfaces and sharp corners in the prison! Unheard of! People could get hurt! Welcome to the life of a nail.

Bo's life is reduced to thin white coveralls, a whale of a cellmate (400 pounds and counting), and pizza. Hour after hour of making pizza, meal after meal of eating pizza. He's going stir crazy. Then he starts to notice that there are about twenty inmates who don't have to wear the coveralls or eat pizza three meals a day. They wear jeans and gold shirts and get good stuff to eat. What's up with that? Soon enough, Bo finds out. It seems the Warden, aka The Hammer, loves the highly illegal sport of football. The Goldshirts are his football team. They're the fittest, meanest, and toughest guys in the prison. And Bo's about to become one of them. Is this a good thing? Bo's not too sure about that!

Bo's prison life takes another strange turn when Bork, an artificial intelligence program he created for school, suddenly starts showing up on the prison computers. It shouldn't be able to do that, since Bo isn't a very good programmer and Bork was barely going to get him a passing grade. But now Bork could...and does...pass for human, and he's determined to get Bo out of jail free.

Which will get Bo out of prison first, football or Bork? And will that be a good thing, or just another in a series of rash actions?

Musings: (Sorry, I didn't start marking things until I was halfway through the book!)

• Every time I read the word "Bork" it made me think of The Muppet Show and the Swedish Chef. This is a good thing (to me), and possibly not completely unintentional.

• I liked the first part of this book the most, because it was the part that really concentrated on telling us about all the ridiculous laws and procedures that have arisen in the future in the cause of keeping people safe. I'm old enough to remember when no one thought twice about a playground with swing sets on asphalt, when playgrounds still had jungle gyms, and when kids could still play tag at recess. (Yeah, there are schools that are forbidding TAG these days, for crying out loud, including California and Massachusetts.) Guess what? Even though we occasionally fell and scraped a knee (or even broke an arm), we survived to tell the tale and our parents didn't think it was a calamity. They just figured it was just something that occasionally happened when kids played. And have you seen the warning labels on products today? "Caution: Will be hot when removed from oven." Well, duhh! Isn't that why we put it in there in the first place? Ridiculous. So I just loved Hautman's taking the overprotectiveness thing over the top like this.

• A favorite paragraph: "I started thinking again about my last conversation with Bork...He claimed that I was innocent because my assault on Korlohs was an unavoidable consequence of my being human. But if that were true, then everything everybody did was unavoidable, and no one could be held responsible for anything. And if nobody could be held responsible, then who would build the roads and behead the shrimp and make the pizzas? And what would stop violent, undisciplined people like me from running rampant through society?"

• Another favorite section, but too long to quote in full: pp. 212-214. Bo is talking to Bork. "I'm not happy with you, Bork." "Explain." "You almost got me killed." Bork sat back in his chair and regarded me through his sunglasses. I was pretty sure that behind them his gold irises were spinning. After a few seconds he spoke. "You appear to be alive." "So do you," I said." (Bork is an artificial intelligence program Bo created in school.) In the rest of the conversation Bo tries to explain to Bork what acceptable odds are when putting his life in danger. Bork doesn't quite get it. Fun.

• How lame is this? It took me half the book before I realized how I should be hearing "WindO" in my head! I kept breaking the word into two distinct parts. Don't. D'oh!

I wasn't a particular fan of Pete Hautman's until a year or so ago. That doesn't mean I didn't like his books. I just hadn't read many of them. Then I read Sweetblood, which has an interesting take on (among other things) what vampires really are. Then I read Invisible, which is a completely different kind of book. I'd heard a lot about Mr. Was, so I ordered and read that. Another completely different kind of book (and a little mind-boggling, too, what with the time travel and figuring out who's who!). Then I read Godless. You guessed it - different again. (I mean, who thinks about worshipping water towers? And how many people could take that and make it logical and thought-provoking, as well as fun?) I enjoy the places Hautman's books take me, almost always with a sense of humor and always more than just a good story. Rash follows that path. In my book, Hautman is always worth a read.