Sarah Darer Littman

{My thoughts} – Sammy is your typical high school girl that worries about all the typical things in life. She worries about passing he’d SAT, passing he’d drivers test and others. In the middle of all this worrying she starts keeping secrets from her parents.

One weekend her and her friends sneak off to a concert and she borrows her mom’s sweater without asking. While at the concert the sweater gets ruined and a few days after her dad’s company gets hacked as well as their daily cloud.

The hackers release the information stolen and in it is her personal journal. Soon her parents know everything and she’s a social pariah at school.

This book made me think about how hard it is to find your place in a chaotic world. That when your entire life is posted online for the world to see it makes sense why you’d come to believe your life may be over. That parents as well as children have the potential to keep life altering secrets from one another.

I recommend this book for any teenager that is having problems getting along with both friends and family. I believe this book has the potential to help them see that just because things seem awful it doesn’t mean they can’t get a tad bit easier to deal with. Sometimes the best thing you can do is take everything one day at a time and remember it too will pass.… (more)

Honestly, I think this book was good, not enjoyable per se, but necessary and gripping. It's a book for teens that shows just how easy it can be to surround yourself with the wrong people. When Declan breaks his arm after doing a stupid stunt his baseball career is all but over. He is beyond devastated and angry. Baseball was his everything. He starts lashing out at his twin sister, his parents, and his friend Jake. He wants to blame everyone but himself. He starts alienating his friends and family and holes himself up in his room playing video games. When he gets an invite to play an exclusive crusades style game by some new online friends, he is stoked. These guys seem to "get" him. Slowly he starts to think and act like his new online friends and then finds out that some of his co-workers at the grocery store think the same way. Soon he is totally immersed with these "friends." The guys he hangs out with believe that globalists are out to take over the world and that white people need to take back what is theirs. It gets dark quick. The story is told through two alternating perspectives: Declan and his best friend Jake who just happens to be Jewish. Eye opening. For fans of Heroine by Mindy McGinnis.… (more)

A tad juvenile feeling, but a quick read.

I've been wanting to read this for a long time because I love books about real-life issues. And also books like this always make me really happy that I didn't have to deal with social media when I was "growing up". I can only imagine all the stupid stuff that teenagers do to each other over the internet just because it's easy.

My heart breaks for all the kids out there going through online bullying and having to see the mean things that people write. If you're one of those people, just know that people suck, and Facebook makes it easier for sucky people to show off their suckage. They would never say it to your face, they're just cowards w/ a keyboard. (I know that doesn't make it any better, but I wish there were words that could!!).

As far as books go, I wouldn't put this up with my favorites. It had a good story: girl with a history of depression gets dumped publicly on social media, peers jump in and "like" the post, girl ends up in the hospital over it... and other spoilery stuff I can't mention. It was a book I read really fast and wanted to keep reading and reading, but there was a lot I didn't like about it also. The characters weren't my favorite. I like a flawed character, but all the characters in this book were mega-selfish and had MAJOR brat moments, even the adults. It's like each character was trying to yell louder than the other character to be able to be heard. And they all got super pissed if anyone else was getting the attention. I can take 1 or 2 people like that, but everyone? It was super difficult.

Beyond the brat-attack moments, the book also felt a little juvenile. I read almost exclusively YA, and most of them don't feel this young. I don't know if it was because the characters were less developed or what, but I definitely would recommend this to younger readers. Also, the cautionary, after-school specialness of it would be for the younger reader.

The ending frustrated me a little because I wanted people to feel bad, and not just for themselves. There are things that happen in this book that deserve many apologies and very few of those apologies went around. Yes, many (all) of the characters were self-centered, but I wanted them to GROW and they didn't. It was all about ME ME ME in the beginning and it was the same in the end. I did like that some things were left up in the air. Problems weren't just magically fixed, but more character growth would have been nice.

OVERALL: I liked it, not anywhere near loved. I'm glad I read it, and even enjoyed reading it, but it wasn't without it's flaws. The characters got on my nerves, and there was a frustrating lack of character growth, but it was an issue that I'm glad a book was written about. I'd say it's worth a try, but get it from the library.

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