Review of "Bluescreen"

"Can you even do that?"

     This is the question of the day in Bluescreen, the latest novel by Dan Wells. It's 2050, and technology has flipped the world on its head. Virtual reality is accessed through the djinni, a computer surgically implanted into the human brain, complete with a port at the base of the skull. The djinni is Marisa Carneseca's portal to the net, including the Overworld, a sports-and-combat game where her team is rapidly becoming famous. When Anja invites the rest of the team--that is, the members who live in Los Angeles--to her house for a surprise, the Cherry Dogs are happy to comply. That is, until they see what Anja has discovered: a computer virus called Bluescreen, which hijacks the user's djinni and gives them a massive high. More importantly, it takes control of their body, which means that whoever controls the code is about to have access to an army. And it's just been distributed to her neighborhood.

     Marisa and her team, known best as the Cherry Dogs, are quite the diverse lot. Quicksand and Fang live in different countries, Anja is a local rich girl, and Sahara is a fashionista who streams live video footage of her life to the net forums. Then there's Bao, pickpocket extraordinare and possibly the only human on Earth without a djinni. Meanwhile, Marisa is simply a poor-ish daughter of a restaurant owner in Mirador, one of LA's Mexican neighborhoods. These six complicated individuals joined by their lust for adventure, but Bluescreen is something else. It's a threat few see coming, and one the Cherry Dogs shouldn't be able to defeat. On the other hand, since achieving the impossible online is a regular occurrence for them, doing the same in real life will be easy. Right?

     Wrong. That doesn't stop them from trying, though. Rather, it doesn't stop Marisa from trying, or from dragging her friends along with her. The six-some soon find themselves entangled in more scrapes and near-misses than they care to think about, even as the gang problem in Mirador becomes steadily worse. These subplots bring out extra facets in the characters and settings that really lend an air of believability to the entire work. And when the team breaks open a case of coding or hacking skills, the atmosphere alone is enough to make them easy to swallow. Unfortunately, this doesn't stop the secondary cast from growing static from time to time, a side effect of such an ambitious plot.

     In a world like this one, it wouldn't be a surprise if Marisa was an only child, if not an orphan. As it turns out, she's a middle child wedged between a gangster and two school-aged kids. Her parents run a Mexican restaurant, pay protection money to the local "police", and care a great deal for their progeny. Their continuous interference in her life drives our heroine up the wall, but is just the thing to ground her life in this vast fictional world. It contributes to the plot as well, and not in a minor way: her parents' reaction to her Overworld addiction, coupled with her younger sister's hero-worship, provides a large chunk of twists, cliffhangers, and boosts to the plot.

     The flag-raisers within these pages are few and far between. The cursing is primarily in Spanish, so non-speakers will merely see italicized words that get the point across. What is said in English is minor enough that most parental inspections should approve. Violence is well-placed and hardly graphic, though it certainly isn't G-movie clean. There's no romance, just a wholesome group friendship that want to save the world.

     I would recommend this book to readers interested in a distinctly cyberpunk future in which the core of society is at risk of destruction. The threat to the djinni system is terrifying, never mind the fact Bluescreen is everywhere. Marisa and her friends are fun, compelling, and strong-willed, just the kind of people who might be able to pull this off. They're also teenagers, and their home lives--or Marisa's, at least--play a very real part in the overarching plot. Dan Wells has aimed impossibly high with Bluescreen, and that ambition has paid off with a grand total of four stars.