Publication date: Jun 21, 2022 by Sylvia Liu, Penguin Young Readers Group
My Thoughts:
This is an exciting beat the clock and the bad guys middle grades science fiction #AAPI adventure. Hana canʻt wait to turn 13 so she can get enmeshed with the webverse and finally get closer to her older sister Lina and her mom who never seems to have any time for Hana after her father died.
Hana is a curious 12 year old who loves to make automatons by looking for spare parts at the dump. It is something that she learned from her grandmother and her father. But now that her father is gone and her Popo (grandmother) seems to be losing her memory, Hana feels lonely and misunderstood.
She meets new friends in the Start-Up school, but a tattooed hacker, Ink, who she meets at the dump opens up a new vision of technology, secret experiments and corporate power grabs. Are all the adults hiding secrets or is Hana paranoid now? Who can she trust?
This book will keep readers hooked. If they like this book, offer the graphic novel In Real Life: IRL by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang, or even the indigenous YA sci fi Walking in Two Worlds by Wab Kinew. And of course, if they have not read or watched it, the original reality versus web fantasy is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline and Marie Luʻs duology Warcross and Wildcard.
From the Publisher:
Perfect for fans of Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee, this thrilling, cinematic sci-fi novel follows Hana Hsu’s mission to save herself—and her friends—from a dangerous plot to control their minds.
Hana Hsu can’t wait to be meshed.
If she can beat out half her classmates at Start-Up, a tech school for the city’s most talented twelve-year-olds, she’ll be meshed to the multiweb through a neural implant like her mom and sister. But the competition is fierce, and when her passion for tinkering with bots gets her mixed up with dangerous junkyard rebels, she knows her future in the program is at risk.
Even scarier, she starts to notice that something’s not right at Start-Up—some of her friends are getting sick, and no matter what she does, her tech never seems to work right. With an ominous warning from her grandmother about being meshed, Hana begins to wonder if getting the implant early is really a good idea.
Desperate to figure out what’s going on, Hana and her friends find themselves spying on one of the most powerful corporations in the country—and the answers about the mystery at Start-Up could be closer to home than Hana’s willing to accept. Will she be able to save her friends—and herself— from a conspiracy that threatens everything she knows?
If she can beat out half her classmates at Start-Up, a tech school for the city’s most talented twelve-year-olds, she’ll be meshed to the multiweb through a neural implant like her mom and sister. But the competition is fierce, and when her passion for tinkering with bots gets her mixed up with dangerous junkyard rebels, she knows her future in the program is at risk.
Even scarier, she starts to notice that something’s not right at Start-Up—some of her friends are getting sick, and no matter what she does, her tech never seems to work right. With an ominous warning from her grandmother about being meshed, Hana begins to wonder if getting the implant early is really a good idea.
Desperate to figure out what’s going on, Hana and her friends find themselves spying on one of the most powerful corporations in the country—and the answers about the mystery at Start-Up could be closer to home than Hana’s willing to accept. Will she be able to save her friends—and herself— from a conspiracy that threatens everything she knows?
No comments:
Post a Comment