Amy - by Marry Hooper

It has been a long time since I’ve read such a terrifyingly bad novel.

This story is marketed as a novel where a girl ventures into the big, bad world wide web and meets the boy of her dreams. Of course, then he turns out to be nothing like he seems.

In actuality, it’s every cliché about the web your mother ever warned you about packed into a thin, watery book.

Amy’s character is hard to sympathize with. She is, in short, a self-absorbed brat with nothing better to do than sneer down at the last classmate who will have anything to do with her. She whines of how her two best friends abandoned her, when, while her friends were as jeering as she, she was the one to stir everything up. She put her head under the guillotine blade, handed her friends the rope, and then blamed them for letting go.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Never mind how utterly abysmal the portrayal of the internet was. I don’t even mean the light it was given, not at all. I mean the poorly mimicked chat logs and the complete lack of lingo used by Hooper. Firstly, I know of no chat programs like the one she described. Usually, you have a client that stores a buddy list. I have yet to come across something where the program not only tells me who is online, but who they are talking to as well. Then it was the sheer way the characters talked online. For one, it seemed as though they were all surprisingly eloquent and merely replaced their ‘you’s with a capital ‘U’.

Why this is completely wrong:

-people type in all sorts of ways online, but Zed, Busybee, and Sexylegs all talk exactly the same.

-their spelling is impeccable for people who use shorthand.

-I saw one usage of the letter ‘R’ for ‘our’. I’ve never seen that done before. ‘r’ is usually reserved for ‘are’.

-Hooper capitalizes all of her shorthand. Shorthand has always pained me, but somehow Hooper’s weak imitation pains me more.

Let me explain. Many of my online friends type with shorthand. Some of us choose to type everything out. As far as abbreviations and slaughtering grammar for speed go, the first thing that is killed is capitalization. A typical conversation would go as such:

annoyingbadger (12:33:51): hey steph

annoyingbadger (12:34:06): how r u?

lostneverwhere (12:34:38): Pretty good. You?

annoyingbadger (12:34:56): alright but my parents suck

annoyingbadger (12:35:03): they wont let me outtonite

lostneverwhere (12:35:11): Ever consider it’s because you came home at 2 AM last time?

annoyingbadger (12:35:41): lol shut up. you suck to

In Hooperese:

Z: Hey, Babes.

Z: How RU?

B: Pretty good, U?

Z: Alright. My parents suck, though.

Z: They won’t let me out 2 night.

B: Ever consider it’s because U came home at 2A.M. last time?

Z: Hahaha. Shut up. U suck 2.

I could go on, but I’ve wasted enough time on this heart-wrenchingly bad novel. It’s a typical story trying to preach the dangers of the internet with a ‘girl just like you’ scenario, written by someone who has a poor understanding of the topic at best. Mary Hooper needs to stick to topics where she knows what she’s writing about. I won’t be touching her books again.

Weishan Chin

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