I
spoke at a children’s book event the other year, and this book – Mind Games – was one of the pre-press books that I picked up .. I love teenage books – good moral message, typically fairly fast paced, and always lots to think about.
With echoes of books such as Divergent, this book takes us into a future (post World War 3), in which the world is largely controlled by a large virtual-reality corporation (oh yes, we’ve been having these conversations at many conferences – e.g. does the government or Facebook control more of our lives?). Our main character, Luna (named after a Harry Potter character) is hiding that she is able to always be in the ‘real’ world, when plugged into ‘Realtime’, which pretty much everyone else (aside from a few religious protestors) is plugged into. Lots of secrets to uncover, and lots of questioning as to what is ‘real’, and how much people want to experience ‘reality’, or whether they want to move beyonds the bounds of the physical .. you can see why I enjoyed this one!
An interesting quote re the idolisation of rationality over intelligence:
