Book 40: So Yesterday.

Book 40: So Yesterday

Scott Westerfeld
Penguin Books.
2004
Rating:
2.5

From School Library Journal


Grade 7-10–New York City is the backdrop for this trendy, often surreal novel with a message about the down-and-dirty business of inventing and marketing pop-cultural fads. Hunter Braque, 17, is part of a focus group that views advertisements for shoes. A product gets the nod if it is "skate," but it is more important to point out what might be "uncool." When the teen brings Jen to the next meeting, she spots uncool right away and lets Hunter's boss, Mandy, know. The next day, the woman tells Hunter that the client appreciated Jen's original thinking, and that their help is needed for a "big deal." Jen and Hunter quickly find themselves caught up in a strange turn of events when Mandy disappears. Their search for her begins in an abandoned building in Chinatown and leads to a wild, drunken party at the Museum of Natural History where people are viewing advertisements for a new shampoo. This is a somewhat entertaining story, but awkward phrasing throughout defeats the "coolness," and the scenes involving Hunter's epidemiologist dad slow down the plot. Readers will better appreciate the satire and humor about the consumer world in M. T. Anderson's Feed (Candlewick, 2002), in which the characters are far more realistic.–Kelly Czarnecki, Bloomington Public Library, IL
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What Do I Think?
Way to have an exposition. I mean, it was all right, but we never get to really know the characters. There is a wall that should have been broken in the very beginning. I guess it can be explained with a single passage from the book:

"You've probably seen the show yourself if you've kept your eyes on the ground, but only in pieces. It's easy to recognize, on the client's products and a dozen knockoffs  and bootlegs- that part of any show the rewires your brain,makes you think for a moment that you can fly. But you'll never hold the whole thing in your hand. It went up in smoke.
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."

We will never get the perfect novel we want, only the small scattered pieces of what could be.