Susie Day
Scholastic
Release date: August 1, 2008
List price: $16.99 (240p)
ISBN: 978-0545073301
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Review - "Serafina67 *urgently requires life*"
Reviewer: Cori Vella
Rating:
Serafina67 *urgently requires life* really does require a life — urgently. This offering is full of LOL-isms, netspeak, and petty high school drama written in the form of a teenage girl's blog, complete with comments from her real-life and online friends. But what it isn't is engaging, smart, or at all worth reading.
Sarah (known throughout Ulife, a fictional Livejournal immitation, as serafina67) receives a "shiny new laptop" for Christmas, which she uses to start her own blog. With her third entry in December, she decides to make the resolution to become happy again by April 22nd. This proves to be a more difficult goal to reach than she originally thought, as her divorced father is getting married again, her mother is dating a married man, and her own boyfriend cheats on her (which she discovers by looking at a mutual friend's Ulife — complete with photographic proof).
That's pretty much it. The story generally goes nowhere with its sophomoric drama, and the ending is a confusing cliffhanger that leaves more questions than answers.
The book is written just like a blog — points for accuracy and whatnot, but major, major deductions for exactly the same thing. I get enough "OMGLOLWTFBBQ" when reading my own friends' Livejournals. Why should I be seeking out the brain-numbing, IQ-dropping, teenager-gone-wild-on-AOL-Instant-Messenger lingo in fiction? If I wanted to read a teenage girl's blog, I could find countless ones online by myself. What's more, I could find dozens of blogs a thousand times more interesting.
Blogging provides interactivity between the writer and the reader, what with comments, permalinks, delicio.us, ratings, Facebook and Myspace integration, and a myriad of other features that modern-day blogs have. With serafina67 *urgently requires life*, all that interactivity is stripped away, taking half of the fun with it. What's left is a book that tries too hard to be authentic, and in doing so, gives the reader a massive headache.
Fictional blog? No thanks. I'll stick with the real ones.
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