Be More Chill

by Ned Vizzini

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.

"A fresh, spontaneous, and original voice it's fun, wacky, outrageous. I just couldn't stop reading."
—Judy Blume

"Quirky, Funny, and Dead-on?imagine Holden Caulfield with internet access."
?New York Post

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786809967
Publisher:	Disney Press
Publication date:	09/01/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	8,022
Product dimensions:	5.24(w) x 7.58(h) x 0.78(d)
Lexile:	HL700L (what's this?)
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

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. 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.

Who wouldn't want an ingestible super-computer-in-a-pill designed to make the person who swallows it way cooler than he or she ever was? When shy, dorky Jeremy Heere learns of the device-known as a squip-he knows he must do whatever it takes (in his case, steal and sell a portion of his unpleasant aunt's Beanie Baby collection) to raise the $600 necessary to get one. Soon the squip is installed in his brain, dispensing such crucial nuggets as "You have to talk as per rap-slash-hip-hop, the dominant music of youth culture" and "Step one is that you stop pacing and get a new shirt, Jeremy." All this is in service of his ultimate goal: winning the affections of choosy and self-assured Christine. Vizzini (Teen Angst? Naaah...) gives a fresh twist to familiar messages about being loyal to one's friends and true to oneself, thanks to the over-the-top plot and tangy narrative. Readers grappling with their own social status will appreciate the fact that while the notion of coolness may be satirized here, it's certainly not demonized or dismissed. Although the squip's advice is not infallible, Jeremy's life really does improve once he polishes his social skills. Semi-cool, would-be cool and even cool readers are likely to be entertained by the wry, nearly anthropological observations of the high school caste system, from a 23-year-old author who, as a teenager, wrote for the New York Press and the New York Times Magazine. Ages 13-up. (June) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Gr 9 Up-This wacky, irreverent novel stars an uncouth, smart, nerdy, but sympathetic antihero, Jeremy Heere. The teen actually keeps Humiliations Sheets on which he tallies the number and types of affronts that he encounters in his daily life at his New Jersey high school and finds solace in the evenings viewing Internet porn. When the girl he secretly loves is cast opposite him in a school play, he decides to find a way to break the mold he's built around himself so that she will understand and reciprocate his admiration. Buying an extreme bit of illegal nanotechnology in the back room of a Payless shoe store, Jeremy swallows the "squip," which embeds itself in his brain and advises him on all the cool things to say and do to impress Christine. Vizzini has devised a hilarious alternate reality, very close to the one available to Jeremy's real peers-Eminem is a pop-culture presence (although he has recently died in this world). The squip malfunctions when Jeremy takes Ecstasy (not only miscuing Jeremy but also defaulting to Spanish), and so on. There are genuine and serious issues of morality folded into this story, including Jeremy's dilemma of how to make himself both attractive and sincere in Christine's perception. Like Janet Tashjian's The Gospel According to Larry (Holt, 2001), this novel has substance as well as flash, and lots of appeal to bright teens. Although it is literary and funny, the blatant sexual themes and use of profanity may limit its acceptability in schools.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

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

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