Be More Chill

by Ned Vizzini Narrated by Ramón de Ocampo

Overview

The groundbreaking novel that inspired the Broadway musical! Jeremy Heere is your average high school dork. Day after day, he stares at beautiful Christine, the girl he can never have, and dryly notes the small humiliations that come his way. Until the day he learns about the "squip." A pill-sized supercomputer that you swallow, the squip is guaranteed to bring you whatever you most desire in life. By instructing him on everything from what to wear, to how to talk and walk, the squip transforms Jeremy from geek to the coolest guy in class. Soon he is friends with his former tormentors and has the attention of the hottest girls in school. But Jeremy discovers that there is a dark side to handing over control of your life--and it can have disastrous consequences.

Editorial Reviews

As the ultimate outsider, the class-confirmed dork, Jeremy Heere has a sharp cynical sense of what he's missing: "Being Cool is obviously the most important thing on earth…. It's more important that getting a job, or having a girlfriend, or political power, or money, because all those things are predicated by Coolness." When given the opportunity to achieve Total Coolness by simply ingesting a pill-sized supercomputer, Jeremy gulps it down. It doesn't take him long to realize that success has a dark side.

Kirkus Reviews

A self-centered teenager swallows a supercomputer to make himself cool in this strangely amoral piece. Fifteen-year-old Jeremy is tired of being abused by popular kids. He's also tired of Internet porn; he wants real girls. So he buys an underground pill called a "squip," a supercomputer that lodges in his brain and tells him which shirts to buy and which girls to approach-and to ditch his old best friend. He follows the directions and is befriended, or at least calmly tolerated, by the cool kids. He eventually gets rid of the squip, but this is more because it stops doing its job (his favorite girl now hates him) than because Jeremy gains any sense of personal responsibility. There's no narrative comment on whether coolness is really the best aspiration or whether girls are real people. An interesting if unwieldy premise technologically, but diluted by the lack of character growth. (Science fiction. YA)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171200077
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	03/08/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

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