Author: Barry Lyga, Morgan Baden, Jennifer Beals, and Tom Jacobsen
Genre: YA science fiction
Release Date: September 3rd, 2019
Publisher: KCP Loft
Source: Finished copy received from publisher which did not influence my opinion
My rating: 5 stars
Synopsis:
Cassie McKinney has always believed in the Hive.
Social media used to be out of control, after all. People were torn apart by trolls and doxxers. Even hackers - like Cassie's dad - were powerless against it.
But then the Hive came. A better way to sanction people for what they do online. Cause trouble, get too many "condemns," and a crowd can come after you, teach you a lesson in real life. It's safer, fairer and perfectly legal.
Entering her senior year of high school, filled with grief over an unexpected loss, Cassie is primed to lash out. Egged on by new friends, she makes an edgy joke online. Cassie doubts anyone will notice.
But the Hive notices everything. And as her viral comment whips an entire country into a frenzy, the Hive demands retribution.
One moment Cassie is anonymous; the next, she's infamous. And running for her life.
With nowhere to turn, she must learn to rely on herself - and a group of Hive outcasts who may not be reliable - as she slowly uncovers the truth about the machine behind the Hive.
New York Times bestselling authors Barry Lyga and Morgan Baden have teamed up for the first time to create a novel that's gripping, terrifying and more relevant every day, based on a story proposal by Jennifer Beals and Tom Jacobson.
My Review:
This book was so good. So much of it relates to what is going on today, our President, our social media issues, society, mob mentality, all of it. It was really scary and had me gasping even at certain parts. It definitely reminded me of one episode of the show Black Mirror that starred Bryce Dallas Howard, where everyone rated everyone else when they saw them, and how you could take away the little perks and even just ease of every day life by down-voting people. I've also been told there is another episode of the same show where someone is able to control mechanical bees to kill people that have done something on social media. I will have to watch that one. But anyway, the main character Cassie lost her father and had to move to a new school where she doesn't really want to fit in. Her father was a well-known/infamous hacker and her mother is a professor of classics. She doesn't get along with her mother, but misses her father a lot. She finally tries to fit in with a group of girls who are kind of the top of the popular kids. The girls goad her into posting something about the President's grandchild and her tasteless joke backfires in that everyone gets up in arms and all of a sudden she is the one the Hive is after and she runs. We get a lot of the hacker group story in this, which is very interesting, although maybe a little high-techy at times. There's definitely a lot of adventure and suspense and back doors and twists and turns. There are things that the President in the book does or says that totally are like you'd think our actual current President in real life would do.
My only complaint was with the third person type of narration, it was somewhat omniscient in that we got both Cassie and her mother Rachel's thoughts and actions, and sometimes it was confusing because it was within the same page without any separation to tell us we'd changed points of view. Other than that this was such a real book to how things are and how easy it is for people to go so intense over the smallest thing, such as what a person has said.
