Book Review: Girl Gone Viral

Author: Arvin Ahmadi 

Published: 21 May 2019

Genres: Young Adult Fiction, Science Fiction

For seventeen-year-old, Opal Hopper, code is magic. She builds entire worlds from scratch: Mars craters, shimmering lakes, any virtual experience her heart desires. 

But she can’t code her dad back into her life. When he disappeared after her tenth birthday, leaving only a cryptic note. Opal tried desperately to find him. And when he never turned up, she enrolled at a boarding school for technical prodigies and tries to forget. 

Until now, because WAVE, the world’s biggest virtual reality platform, has announced a contest where the winner gets to meet its billionaire founder. The same billionaire who worked closely with Opal’s dad. The one she always believed might know where he went. The one who maybe even murdered him. 

What begins as a small data hack to win the contest spirals out of control when Opal goes viral, digging her deeper into a hole of lies, hacks, and manipulation. How far will Opal go for the answers - or is it attention she wanted for years? 

“Smart, timely and riveting.”— The New York Times Book Review. 

A deliciously good slow paced book with a disappointing ended to say the least, very interesting concept with realistic characters. All the characters are wonderful in this book. Arvin portrayed the characters feelings so beautiful in this books, one can’t help but feel their pain and just want to root for them to succeed. Arvin delivered with the main character, Opal, she made some questionable mistakes, which doesn’t make her good nor bad but one could understand why she did the things she had done. 

The setting of this book was literally jaw dropping, set in the near future where technology is so advanced, people basically lives online 24/7 and everything is monitored and “filmed” live, super scary but interesting at the shame time. The plot starts off sky high, Arvin sets the main mystery and a few others so beautiful well, I had a billion theories, but when you get to the end of the book, you fall flat on your face with all the disappointment just waiting for you.