SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: January 22, 2022] In Beta_
I saw this book at work and was grabbed by the cover (yes, clearly covers do signify something about the book). I decided to read it before reading much about it. I didn’t understand the accolades until I read the acknowledgments at the end. The book was self published through Inkshares, but it then went on to win (or at least do very well in some Nerdist/Inkshares Contest. Which I guess is a big deal, maybe.
The book is set in a small town in the rural Pacific Northwest in 1993. The town of Bickleton is boring. Super boring. There are like three businesses in town, one is a restaurant and grocery store together. Everybody seems to work in the mines. And there’s like a curse on the high school. No a single person has ever gone to college.
And people aren’t exactly sure why–their grades are good, they just apparently aren’t good enough for even community college.
The main characters are Jay Banksman and his best friend Colin Ramirez. They are nerdy boys who love video games and probably won’t be going to the prom.
Their school is a strange set up in which Jay and Colin and some of the other brainier kids are in a special classroom set apart from the rest of the school. I have no idea if this is even remotely realistic, but who knows. There was A-Court, the largest building which was close to the main parking lot and seemed to house all of the cool and popular people. C-Court was smaller and shabbier and was where the dumber kids went–the burn outs.
Jay and Colin felt that A-Court was too vanilla and C-Court was too raw. So they stayed in their trailer area called Tutorial. Their teacher was Miss Rotchkey. She had asked to teach these kids as a kind of experiment. The school principal rolled his eyes at the whole thing but allowed it. Miss Rotchkey was cool, teaching them existentialism and allowing them to use the school’s computer. She was convinced that her class would be the first to go to college.
But then came rejection day. Everyone in the class was rejected from all of their schools, even their safeties.
Things were pretty much the same every day at school. Then one day a rumor spread that there were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pies in the A-Court vending machine. And Jay wanted to get one. So he and Colin snuck down to the A-Court and managed to evade detection from the jocks and the cheerleaders when suddenly there was Jeremy and the Johns. Jeremy McCracken was the most popular boy in school. A handsome jock and star of the baseball team. The Johns were everyone else on the baseball team (I love this little joke that literally everyone else is named John with no last name just initials).
When they see Jay, they crush his pie and punch him in the face. The principal sends Jay to the guidance officer because, hey sometimes life isn’t fair.
Jay’s only solace is in video games. He gets a lot of video game and computer magazines and is always looking for new games to try out. One day he gets a game called The Build. When he puts t into the school computer, the graphics look like just like Bickleton. It’s 8-bit graphics, but there he can see the whole town. Including people walking around. He mouses to his class room and when he raises his hand, the pixel version of himself raises its hand too.
He can’t believe this. He tries to tell people about it, but every time he starts to talk about it to someone, they glaze over and seem to forget everything he just said.
Then things start to look up for him. Liz Knight, the most popular girl in school (who he has known since like first grade when they were actually friendly–the held hands once) breaks up with Jeremy and asks Jay to the prom.
Liz’s best friends (who only like to talk about Beverely Hills 90210) don’t seem to be on board with this–they look down their noses at Jay like everyone else does. So what gives? Is it a prank? It’s hard to know because Liz has been acting really strangely lately (in addition to asking him to prom that is). Has she has a breakdown? Or a breakthrough?
The next day Liz and Jay are talking when Jeremy approaches and asks her to go for a ride with him. She does and Jay is very jealous. He looks at The Build and sees the red Mazda Miata driving away with a little heart above it. He clicks around the screen and sees a menu for disasters. So he clicks on tornado.
And within minutes a tornado appears on the screen. And in the town–a town that has never had a tornado in its history.
There’s a lot going on in this story (although it’s a very fast read). I don’t want to give any kind of spoilers away, but I do like to mention that Jay finds out his avatar’s stats: Strength; Speed; Hit Points; Intelligence. And at some point he moves them all up to ten.
This allows him to take sweet revenge on the Jeremys and to have access to intelligence and memories that he’s never known before.
The story sounds like an all boys story and it kind of is, but as the story moves along, two women become essential to the story. There’s Liz of course, and there is also Stevie, a computer nerd who has mad programming skills.
Having the book set in the nineties means that Harvey overloads the book with 90s pop culture. It goes a bit overboard. He throws in some good music cues (Beck, My Bloody Valentine) and some bad ones (the bullies drive around playing Kriss Kross’ “Jump” all the time. I’m also curious, since I didn’t go to school in the 90s, but would they have played Rage Against the Machine at a prom and would the kids have slam danced? I cannot imagine.
So this was a fun story and one that I read very quickly.
And, if you’re wondering, as I was, about its similarity to other popular culture books and movies, he says in the acknowledgments that he started it about a decade ago and was about a group o seventh graders who found a magic VCR that brought 80’s movie clichés to life. While he was finishing it up, Ready Player One, The Lego Movie and Free Guy (I don’t know this last one) all came out. So he changed his tactics a bit.
