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| Image (c) Non Sequitur Press |
Release Date: March 22nd, 2013
Book Format: eBook
Rating: Three Stars
You can learn a lot about someone looking through their hard drive...
Sixteen-year-old Jan Rose knows that nothing is ever truly deleted. At least, not from the hard drives she scours to create the online identities she calls the Shadownet.
Hobby? Art form? Sad, pathetic plea to garner friendship, even virtually? Sure, Jan is guilty on all counts. Maybe she’s even addicted to it. It’s an exploration. Everyone has something to hide. The Shadownet’s hard drives are Jan’s secrets. They're stolen from her family’s computer recycling business Assured Destruction. If the police found out, Jan’s family would lose its livelihood.
When the real people behind Shadownet’s hard drives endure vicious cyber attacks, Jan realizes she is responsible. She doesn’t know who is targeting these people or why but as her life collapses Jan must use all her tech savvy to bring the perpetrators to justice before she becomes the next victim.
"Stewart offers up an engrossing read about hacking, computers, and the underbelly of the technological world. He has created a strong character in Jan, who the reader cheers on as she does all she can to save her friends and family. While the protagonist is a young woman, an older audience will still find much to enjoy in Jan’s journey."--Library Journal.
"A fun, fast-paced thriller guaranteed to distract teens from Facebook ..." --Kirkus Reviews
Anyhow- on to the actual review.
This book is about a young girl named Jan who loves playing around with computers. In fact, she has three of her own- JanusFlyTrap, which is her main computer, Heckleena and Gump (the pre-internet aged computer). She works at a store with her mother (diagnosed with MS- Multiple Sclerosis) and another co-worker called, appropriately, Assured Destruction. This job is pretty simple- recycling old electronics or, at the customers’ request, destroys them with the certification of authenticity. It’s through this job that she discovers that one of the laptops handed in is Jonny’s laptop who one of her friends and surfs through his harddrive and learns… well, many things about him. This act is, what it seems, to be a catalyst to many events and it looks as if much of it is linked to her.
This is one of the first things that got to me while I was reading this book: Jan made fictional characters to interact with. She created fictional friends to chat to. It’s still pretty weird how she described each computer with a different personality. I mean I love my laptop and all but certainly to not to that extent. On that topic, she also creates false accounts for her classmates (how does no one notice that though???) and for Jonny under the username ‘Paradise57’. High school sucked for me. Okay, practically my whole time through school was horrible. It wasn’t horrible to the point to where I felt like I needed to create personas on the internet of my classmates or of my computers.
In all honesty, I loved the character at first… but the further I got into the book, the more I just found her really immature and childish. She’s certainly not much of a A+ student, either. I don’t even know how she even managed to bypass her grades from her mom from so long if, at one point, the principal admitted that she was pretty much failing all of her classes and her mother threatened to take away her computers if she was still doing unwell. Actually, in fact, I’m fairly certain things would’ve been somewhat good had she spent more time working on her homework and less time playing around with her computers. Especially since one of her English papers just blatantly happened to be plagiarized… needless to say, she definitely needed her priorities checked.
(Highlight text for spoilers) The end got me irritated and it got me questioning about how the authorities handle punishment in that town. Honestly, I really doubt punishing a teenager with more tech-related stuff that got her in trouble in the first place was the best thing to do. The only time I actually agreed with any one of her punishments was when she was suspended from school campus even if it was obviously not her who created the website. She also almost got expelled for plagiarism, but… she actually did plagiarize a paper, so…
Still, it was an interesting adventure through the mind of a teenager who just happens to be incredibly addicted to technology and doesn’t know where she’s crossing the line. In general, it’s a good light read and had a good twist at the end, and as long as you don’t think too hard into what you are actually reading. The main character didn’t grow up, it feels like, or matured at all. Despite this, I am planning on reading the second book ASAP.
Originally posted and shared on December 10th, 2013
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