Scored

by Lauren McLaughlin

Overview

Set in the future when teenagers are monitored via camera and their recorded actions and confessions plugged into a computer program that determines their ability to succeed. All kids given a "score" that determines their future potential. This score can get kids into colleges, grant scholarships, or destroy all hope for the above. Scored's reluctant heroine is Imani, a girl whose high score is brought down when her best friend's score plummets. Where do you draw the line between doing what feels morally right and what can mean your future? Friendship, romance, loyalty, family, human connection and human value: all are questioned in this fresh and compelling dystopian novel set in the scarily forseeable future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375867910
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	10/23/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.56(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.52(d)
Lexile:	HL820L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

LAUREN McLAUGHLIN grew up in the small town of Wenham, Massachusetts. After college and a brief stint in graduate school, she spent 10 unglamorous years writing and producing movies before abandoning her screen ambitions to write fiction full-time. Though she fondly remembers much of her time in Massachusetts—the marina, the beach, various teenage escapades—she cannot, for the life of her, remember her SAT scores, her GPA, or any of the numbers that once summed her up.

Editorial Reviews

Everyone is a number in a dystopian near-future in which lives are determined by a corporation's surveillance-driven scores.

Imani LeMonde has grown up under the watchful cameras of Score Corp, a software company promising access to advancement opportunities for those with high-enough scores. When her best friend Cady's score plummets, Cady becomes a liability. If Imani can keep her score over 90 until she graduates, she gets to go to college—otherwise, she can't afford a future. The prospect of freedom through college means being under constant corporate surveillance, making it risky for her to see Cady or Diego, an intelligent yet unscored classmate. When Diego wants to partner with Imani for an essay assignment requiring the scored students to write persuasively against the score and the unscored to argue for it, Imani's score-quest leads her into playing both sides while trying to decide which one is hers. McLaughlin (Recycler, 2009, etc.) keeps the heavy, philosophical ideas married to the characters, thus preventing the story from becoming a preachy rant. Diego's flaws and privilege along with the tension of Imani's final score looming overhead complicate what would otherwise be an open agenda.

The bold, aggressive narrative condemns both No Child Left Behind–style testing and current financial policies, cautioning about what could happen to social mobility in the face of stark inequity.(Science fiction. 13 & up)

Kirkus Reviews