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A review by whatischellereading
Everything About You by Heather Child
3.0
The book surrounds Freya and her foster-sister, Ruby. Years earlier, Freya loved video games and didn’t want to leave a friend’s house as she was having too much fun. Ruby, being the responsible older sister, started walking to the friend’s house to pick up her rebellious little sister and bring her home. On her way there, she went missing and was never heard from again…
Flash forward 7 years, Freya is living with her now ex-boyfriend, Julian, after discovering his “cyber-cheating” via virtual reality. She is in a dead end job, with a boss she despises, with a fear of Virtual Reality games after being so engrossed in one 7 years earlier while her sister was potentially abducted. Julian’s father, Thalius, gifts his son the new Beta Smartface, a sort of computerised personal assistant, to potentially get his son out of his “sick cyber habits”. Julian isn’t interested and passes the Smartface to Freya to use. At first, everything is as you would expect, the Smartface is ensuring Freya gets to work on time and keeps to a schedule but then it starts to give Freya some déjà vu. The Smartface declares it’s Ruby. Using an algorithm of social media and personal history, the Smartface is able to imitate Ruby at 24 years old, rather than 17 when she went missing. Freya begins to get sucked in as it’s her big sister, whom she misses and feels responsible for in her vanishing.
The story surrounds Freya’s inability to let go of her sister, being so used to hearing her sisters voice, having her sisters support she seems to forget that it’s a computer simulation, it’s not Ruby. Determined that her sister is still alive somewhere, Freya sets out on a journey to conquer her fears of virtual reality in order to find her sister, somehow.
As our society is already so addicted to gadgets which can do so many things for us, it’s not a far fetched idea that “smartfaces” will be in the market in the future. It gave me a bit of a fear, almost a wake up call, on how much I rely on my phone, my social media accounts and the internet – just how much does the internet know about me? How much time with gadgets is too much? If more gadgets come out in the future, will I become addicted? Will I be able to differentiate between reality and online? I did enjoy this book but was a bit confusing when it came to the virtual reality portion – it gave me a bit of an Assasin’s Creed/Skyrim vibe. Overall, I’d give this a solid 3.5 out of 5.
Flash forward 7 years, Freya is living with her now ex-boyfriend, Julian, after discovering his “cyber-cheating” via virtual reality. She is in a dead end job, with a boss she despises, with a fear of Virtual Reality games after being so engrossed in one 7 years earlier while her sister was potentially abducted. Julian’s father, Thalius, gifts his son the new Beta Smartface, a sort of computerised personal assistant, to potentially get his son out of his “sick cyber habits”. Julian isn’t interested and passes the Smartface to Freya to use. At first, everything is as you would expect, the Smartface is ensuring Freya gets to work on time and keeps to a schedule but then it starts to give Freya some déjà vu. The Smartface declares it’s Ruby. Using an algorithm of social media and personal history, the Smartface is able to imitate Ruby at 24 years old, rather than 17 when she went missing. Freya begins to get sucked in as it’s her big sister, whom she misses and feels responsible for in her vanishing.
The story surrounds Freya’s inability to let go of her sister, being so used to hearing her sisters voice, having her sisters support she seems to forget that it’s a computer simulation, it’s not Ruby. Determined that her sister is still alive somewhere, Freya sets out on a journey to conquer her fears of virtual reality in order to find her sister, somehow.
As our society is already so addicted to gadgets which can do so many things for us, it’s not a far fetched idea that “smartfaces” will be in the market in the future. It gave me a bit of a fear, almost a wake up call, on how much I rely on my phone, my social media accounts and the internet – just how much does the internet know about me? How much time with gadgets is too much? If more gadgets come out in the future, will I become addicted? Will I be able to differentiate between reality and online? I did enjoy this book but was a bit confusing when it came to the virtual reality portion – it gave me a bit of an Assasin’s Creed/Skyrim vibe. Overall, I’d give this a solid 3.5 out of 5.