Wednesday 12 June 2019

Girl Gone Viral - Book Review/Rant


Girl Gone Viral
by Arvin Ahmadi


What is it about:
For seventeen-year-old Opal Hopper, code is magic. She builds entire worlds from scratch: Mars craters, shimmering lakes, any virtual experience her heart desires.

But she can't code her dad back into her life. When he disappeared after her tenth birthday, leaving only a cryptic note, Opal tried desperately to find him. And when he never turned up, she enrolled at a boarding school for technical prodigies and tried to forget.

Until now. Because WAVE, the world's biggest virtual reality platform, has announced a contest where the winner gets to meet its billionaire founder. The same billionaire who worked closely with Opal's dad. The one she always believed might know where he went. The one who maybe even murdered him.

What begins as a small data hack to win the contest spirals out of control when Opal goes viral, digging her deeper into a hole of lies, hacks, and manipulation. How far will Opal go for the answers--or is it the attention--she's wanted for years?


What did I think of it:
*might be spoilery*

This book was not what I hoped.

It starts out good, but soon there was this very black and white divide between people who don't like technology and those who do. With Opal discovering that technology can be used to make people lose their privacy very easily I had expected that would be explored more, and that there would be a bit more critical voice added to talk about the misuses of technology. Instead there were only two factions. One was the people who thought all technology was bad, and they were clearly the 'bad guys', while the other group was all for technology and didn't stop to think about how it can be misused, or if they did they were the ones misusing it and loving it.

This made that I soon got very annoyed with the story. I continued reading in hope that the misuse of technology would finally be addressed, but alas. Opal was too busy being popular and finding information about her father to care about anything else.

All in all a disappointing read.

Why should you read it:
It's got its moments.


Buy from Bookdepository

No comments: