The first book to launch my reviews will be "Gamer Girl" by Mari Mancusi. I received a copy of this book as a Christmas gift from my lovely mother. She is pretty great at picking out fun ones, and found this one for me at her most recent book fair at her school.
I had a lot of fun reading this book. It was a quick read, but not completely fluff. It is about a manga-loving high school girl. She has to face not only the divorce of her parents, but also the subsequent move to a new school of "Aberzombies" and a bully who targets her specifically. Feeling friendless, she finds relief in both an online RPG called "Fields of Fantasy," as well as an online friendship that may turn into more.
A lot of these alterna-kid, high school stories can be a bit formulaic. This one does follow the basic format of kid is new, kid gets picked on, kid finds outlet, kid turns outlet into triumphant new idea/activity to share with this school, kid now has friends and happiness. But Mancusi saves this story from feeling formulaic. Mancusi is self-aware in her writing, acknowledging the familiar plot line within her book: "This day was getting more and more like a bad after-school special every minute. After the commercial break, I'd probably start drinking and doing drugs, just to fit in, only to have my best friend die and my mother convince me to head to rehab and restart my life, friendless, sober, and alone, but strangely happy and peaceful about it all," (15). This sense of humor of her main charcter Maddy is a good example of her charcters' personalities. The characters in this book may have some familiar roles. But each are well developed and instead of feeling like recycled regulars, are whole, new people the reader meets for the first time.
I liked also how Mancusi addressed the whole online relationship idea. Kids are naturally going to make friendships online if they spend a lot of time there. When her main character, Maddy faces this, she does so intelligently and realistically. She pays attention to her father's warnings and does not give out personal information. But we see her squirm when asked. She feels uncomfortable and pressured to share her info. But she moves past it well without giving up her safety.
As far as structure goes, there are a lot of other media formats discussed in this book: manga, drawings, and online games that involve whole worlds. Mancusi deftly gave enough information about each of these so that they were visible to the reader as the important parts of the story that they are, without being so detailed as to be distracting. A well-handled detail that I think will have to be increasingly addressed and considered by writers for teens and modern subjects. Maybe not everyone has to write convincing battles or dialogue in an RPG to be modern. But texting and online communication are becoming common enough that other forms of written communication (like books) will start to feel dated if they ignore the changes made my the more modern influences.
This book was engaging, well-written, and had a mature enough theme to feel significant without loosing any of its fun.
Image of cover art by Elise Trinh
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