January 11, 2016
Once a child TV star, Gena is a college-bound fan-fiction writer who is obsessed with one of the leads from her favorite show, Up Below. With loving yet absent parents, wealthy 18-year-old Gena gravitates toward her online Up Below community of reviewers and writers. When she meets 22-year-old super fan and blogger Finn, short for Stephanie, the two develop a bond that stretches into romance, despite the age difference between them, not to mention Finn’s live-in boyfriend, Charlie. As Gena and Finn grow closer, Finn’s fledgling career and relationships start to unwind, creating a listlessness and fear mirrored in Gena’s slow descent into depression and the return of childhood hallucinations. While the authors’ use of a jumble of formats—texts, chat messages, emails, comment threads, browser histories, and more—vividly portrays the minute-to-minute nature of modern communication and serves to question whether virtual lives can be more fulfilling than reality, the framework lessens the impact of significant emotional moments. Still, when Gena faces a life-changing tragedy, Finn and Charlie’s compassion highlights the elasticity of love, family, and identity. Ages 12–up. Agent: John Cusick, Greenhouse Literary Agency.
February 15, 2016
Two devoted members of an emotional cop drama's fandom meet online and feel an instant bond. Gena is a high-achieving senior at a ritzy boarding school, restless and yearning both socially and intellectually for college. Finn is 22, receiving a steady stream of job rejections and ambivalent about living with her boyfriend, Charlie. Finn writes Gena a note about a recent fic, Gena admires Finn's fan art, and soon they're in the throes of an intense friendship, emailing constantly, confiding details about their lives, and making plans to attend a fan convention together. At the convention, Gena is outed as a former child actor who starred in a popular sitcom with one of the leads of Up Below, and when Finn visits Gena at college, they both acknowledge their mutual attraction. Naturally, this intensity isn't sustainable. The narrative is made up entirely of Gena's fanfics, Finn's art, emails, and text-message transcripts. Through it, readers learn that Gena's parents fund a series of globe-trotting adventures using her sitcom earnings and that as she enters college, she's no longer able to get treatment for the dangerous hallucinations that ended her acting career. Events come to a head after a tragic incident on the set of Up Below, and this concluding section is the novel's one weak spot, vaguely petering out after a propulsive, assured beginning. Overall, though, it's very satisfying to see this moment in fandom and Internet-originating relationships so capably represented. (Fiction. 14-17)
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February 1, 2016
Gr 9 Up-Gena and Finn are strangers who are both on the verge of new beginnings. Finn is a recent college graduate desperately searching for a job in a hard economy and living with her long-term boyfriend, who wants more from her than she is able to give. Gena is finishing her final term at high school and is looking anxiously toward college. She is starting to question her past relationships and high school identity, while also stumbling trying to realize her future self. Both young women find an escape and solace from the pressures of the real world in their love of a television show, fan fiction and, eventually, each other. This is a love story told mostly through blog posts, texts, and other media of the digital age. The plotline starts strong and builds very well until about halfway through, where intentions and believability become a bit muddled. However, Moskowitz and Helgeson deliver the book soundly on its feet with an ending that allows readers to close the cover pondering all the different ways humans can love. VERDICT A unique work that will connect with teens who love fandoms.-Ellen Fitzgerald, White Oak Library District, Lockport, IL
Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
March 1, 2016
Grades 9-12 Gena: 18, difficult past, heading to her dream college, obsessed with the TV show Up Below. Finn: 22, living with her longtime boyfriend, struggling to find work, also obsessed with Up Below. Gena/Finn: it seems all they have got in common is a serious yen for the same TV program, but when they meet online, they develop a bond that transcends fandom. But the more they get to know each other, the more complicated their relationship gets. In true millennial fashion, the format here is a digital epistolary, consisting of e-mails, text messages, blog posts, and snippets of Gena's fan fiction and Finn's art. Things take a dramatic turn when fandom and real life overlap, and while it feels somewhat at odds with the rest of the more grounded narrative, Gena and Finn have distinct, readable voices, and this portrayal of the fan world is spot-on. Comparisons to Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl (2013) are inevitable, though ultimately this is a different kind of story, focused firmly on the real, messy relationships that can form in the digital age.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)
July 1, 2016
Gena, eighteen, and Finn, twenty-two, meet in a television show's online fandom and complicate each other's real lives. Told through texts and online communication, the story calls for some suspension of disbelief, but it explores and legitimizes relationships that are more recognizable to today's teens than to older generations. A traumatic event toward book's end creates a significant shift in tone.
(Copyright 2016 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)