Be More Chill

by Ned Vizzini

Overview

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 Supergeek to superchic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781423141068
Publisher:	Disney Hyperion Digital
Publication date:	06/02/2015
Sold by:	DISNEY PUBLISHING WORLDWIDE -EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	10 - 14 Years

About the Author

Author Info: Ned Vizzini began writing for The New York Press at the age of fifteen.  At nineteen, he had his first book published, Teen Angst? Naaah…. He was also author of three other books for young adults including The Other Normals, Be More Chill, the first young adult novel ever chosen as a Today Show Book Club pick, and which is the basis of the musical of the same name, and It's Kind of a Funny Story, which NPR named #56 of the "100 Best-Ever Teen Novels" of all time and which is the basis of the film of the same name. The last novel published before his death, House of Secrets, was a middle-grade fantasy novels co-written with filmmaker Chris Columbus; it debuted on the New York Times best-seller list.Ned's stories often drew on his struggles with anxiety and depression, yet they had a strong comic bent. His fans appreciated his honesty and sense of humor; his writing provided solace to those who saw their feelings and experiences mirrored in the books. He was also very generous to other writers. In 2005, he started the Barnes & Noble Teen Writers Workshops, which he ran until 2012.

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.

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)

Kirkus Reviews