That Weekend by Kara Thomas, 2021

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Three best friends, a lake house, a secret trip - what could go wrong?
It was supposed to be the perfect prom weekend getaway. But it's clear something terrible happened when Claire wakes up alone and bloodied on a hiking trail with no memory of the past forty-eight hours.
Three went up the mountain, but only one came back.
Now everyone wants answers - most of all, Claire. She remembers Friday night, but after that... nothing. And now Kat and Jesse - her best friends - are missing.
That weekend changes everything.
What happened on the mountain? And where are Kat and Jesse? Claire knows the answers are buried somewhere in her memory, but as she's learning, everyone has secrets - even her best friends. And she's pretty sure she's not going to like what she remembers.

(336 pages)

I just set down That Weekend and I'm speechless. It's stirred up a lot of emotions and bad memories, that's for sure. When I was a college freshman, a classmate of mine disappeared on a night out drinking with friends. I helped the searchers for a while, distributing flyers and giving food and drink to the search and rescue people. It was a terrible time, and I'm still haunted sometimes by those memories.

That's why the first half of this book hit me really hard. Claire's desperation when she realizes her friends are missing, and the frenzied ever-shifting search effort to find them, hit too close to home. The crazy conspiracy theories, the stacks of "missing" posters. The latching on to every shred of evidence that might lead somewhere. I was less invested in the mystery portions, just because they didn't strike that nerve quite as much (plus I was more just frustrated with the authority figures more than anything), but I think they were still well done. And overall the early part of the story just hits a very true-to-life desperate, chaotic energy.

I can't speak first-hand to Claire's mental health struggles after the accident, but they seemed pretty realistic to me at least. The smaller touches, like the way she lashes out at her mother when she's most frustrated and the way she obsessively googles every aspect of the case every single day, are exactly the sort of things I think I'd do in her situation.

The narrative shifts in the second half of the book as things pick up speed again. Not gonna lie, I was less invested in the second half. And in many ways it felt a bit less grounded and realistic as it went along. But things definitely stayed interesting, and I genuinely never had any idea what was going to happen next.

I think if I could change one thing about this book, I would get rid of at least one love interest for Claire. It feels like every single guy in Claire's life either is, or used to be, an object of romantic infatuation. After a while it just got a bit distracting.

This is definitely not a book for the faint of heart. Most of the plot twists are deeply disturbing, and that's on top of a baseline level of foul language and references to teenagers having sex. I can't discuss the rest of the mature content without getting close to spoilers, but I can say that the last few chapters make me a bit nauseous. I can tell That Weekend is going to stay with me for at least a few days, and not necessarily in a good way.

If this is a genre you're into, then I recommend this book. I think it's a good book. It just isn't necessarily for everyone and you have to be aware of that going in.

Bash Bash Revolution by Douglas Lain, 2018

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Seventeen-year-old Matthew Munson is ranked thirteenth in the state in Bash Bash Revolution, an outdated Nintendo game from 2002 that, in 2016, is still getting tournament play. He's a high school dropout who still lives at home with his mom, doing little but gaming and moping. That is, until Matthew's dad turns up again. Jeffrey Munson is a computer geek who'd left home eight years earlier to work on a top secret military project. Jeff has been a sporadic presence in Matthew's life, and much to his son's displeasure insists on bonding over video games. The two start entering local tournaments together, where Jeff shows astonishing aptitude for Bash Bash Revolution in particular. 

Then, as abruptly as he appeared, Matthew's father disappears again, just as he was beginning to let Jeff back into his life. The betrayal is life-shattering, and Matthew decides to give chase, in the process discovering the true nature of the government-sponsored artificial intelligence program his father has been involved in. Told as a series of conversations between Matthew and his father's artificial intelligence program, Bash Bash Revolution is a wildly original novel of apocalypse and revolution, as well as a poignant story of broken family.

(293 pages)

I've always been interested in cutting-edge technology and the ways that technological advancements affect society, so I was naturally very excited to read Bash Bash Revolution.

Unfortunately, I didn't like it nearly as much as I'd thought I would. This is for a couple of reasons, so I'll just go through them.

First, the language. Pretty self-explanatory, I thought the profanities were entirely unecessary.

Second, I didn't really like Matthew. I don't care what his reasons were, I just couldn't get behind his whole "smart guy drops out of high school to play video games" story.

Third, I don't like how they represented religion. One of the characters comes from a super-conservative Christian background, but she doesn't act like any of the (many) people I know who actually come from conservative families. Instead, she's basically just a tool for Lain to show the way technology was breaking down old pillars. She is fine as a character, but as a representative of my faith (or, really, of any serious religion) I didn't really like her. Because seriously, people don't change that easily.

And that brings me to my fourth and largest gripe with Bash Bash Revolution: it's completely unrealistic. I doubt an AI would ever seriously come to those sorts of conclusions, or behave in the manner that it does, and it certainly could have been shut down. Plus, there's no way it could obtain enough data to so perfectly develop and present programs to enthrall each person. Not to mention the simple fact that there are many people who simply would not become enthralled forever. Surely I'm not the only one who gets sick when I play VR for more than half an hour without giving my eyes a break, right? And there are old people who would never put the headsets on in the first place. And mothers with young children would never just up and abandon their kids, no matter how good the game they were playing. And so on and so forth. Enough people would not play, or would quit playing after a while, that they would realize what was going on and put a stop to it.

Honestly, I liked the basic premise at the beginning of the book, but I quickly realized that my ability to suspend disbelief simply didn't reach far enough to get invested in Bash Bash Revolution. Plus, this is the sort of book that scares people about tech for no good reason, and as a computer science major I just can't get behind that.

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.