So Yesterday (2004)

So glad I stumbled upon this title! A cute read with a bit of mystery and romance. ( )

Scott Westerfeld is a master of smart, thought-provoking books. This one, about Hunter and Jen and their journey to the dark side of what makes something cool, is a great ride all the way. ( )

This was less like Westerfeld's Uglies series and more like David Levithan meets Cory Doctorow (Westerfeld gives a nod to Doctorow for being the first to use the term "future sarcastic"). There is also some obvious tongue-in-cheek humor: the main character, Hunter, is a "cool hunter," scouting for the latest innovations (Innovators are at the top of the cool pyramid) that can be marketed to Early Adopters and Laggards; one character's name is Futura Garamond (incidentally, the book is set in Garamond, with chapter headings in Futura. I never got used to the font).

Hunter meets Jen (definitely an Innovator) and life gets exciting as they play amateur detective in Manhattan - trying to find out where Hunter's boss Mandy has disappeared to, they stumble on an "anti-client" bent on playing havoc with the current system of cool.

The flap copy promises that So Yesterday "will make you question everything you've ever believed about how to be cool." I'm not sure I would go that far, but this is definitely an enjoyable read.

"Still, you can't blame the client for following the first rule of consumerism: Never give us what we really want. Cut the dream into pieces and scatter them like ashes. Dole out the empty promises. Package our aspirations and sell them to us, cheaply made enough to fall apart." (223) ( )

Hunter is sort of a Cool Detector - that is, he looks for things that are novel and shoots them off to a certain major brand to see about incorporating it into future designs. The story opens with him meeting Jen, who has tied her shoelaces in a particularly unusual way. When Hunter's boss disappears, he and Jen find themselves chasing a group of sort-of anarchists. It's a somewhat interesting take on what makes something "cool" or popular, and why trends fade so quickly, but being someone so totally not fashion-conscious in any form, I couldn't always relate. I've never seen a pair of shoes, for example, that I just had to have. That's an utterly foreign idea to me. All the same, the story itself was kind of fun and Westerfeld always spins a decent yarn. I just wasn't the right audience. ( )

I didn't really understand all of this book, probably because I read it in the span of an hour ( )