This was the book club choice for November and it was quite a departure for us. I've had this book on my shelf for years but had never got round to it, so I was glad to have an excuse to finally get to it. I got it in a Christmas swap a few years ago. I also know a bunch of people that have raved about this book, which really made me want to read it too!
But then I ended up really not liking it. But neither did my friend Janet, and she and I often have very similar taste in books. I slogged my way through this and was interested to see what book club made of it. Mostly people had liked it, but I felt it was one of those where if people had just had a conversation with each other things could have been much simpler. Which yes would have meant no plot, but then I wouldn't have had to read the stupid book in the first place.
The two main protagonists are Sam and Sadie. They are both gamers. They meet firstly when Sam is in hospital when he's about twelve years old. He has been disabled in the car crash which killed his mother and is now living in LA with his grandparents. Sadie's sister has cancer and is in the same ward as Sam. Sam is playing Oregon Trail one day when Sadie comes in and starts playing too. It turns out she can visit Sam and have it count as volunteering for her bat mitzvah, and she racks up nearly a thousand hours with Sam. When he finds this out, he feels betrayed, he feels like their friendship wasn't real. The two fall out and their friendship ends.
Then when they are about twenty they meet again. They are both at college in Boston and they end up forging a friendship again. Sadie is at college for programming and is in a relationship with one of her professors, who is a total dick. Sam and Sadie start to write a game together and it gets noticed. Eventually they start a company with Marx, who is a friend of Sam's and who has a lot of money. He wants to be in LA so he like manipulates both Sam and Sadie into moving back there. Sadie and he eventually start a relationship. Sam and Sadie fall out again and Sam does something which really annoyed me late on in the book. Mostly throughout I had a lot of sympathy for him and found Sadie really selfish, but this incident really annoyed me and left me feeling sour about him.
There's a lot about gaming in the book which I did quite like and as I'm a casual gamer myself and married to a hardcore gamer it is something I know a lot about, but I think if you weren't in that world it would be more difficult to understand. I thought Marx was just too perfect which annoyed me too. I liked Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin so I was disappointed by this and can only give it two out of five.
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