Hello, World! (<– If you’ve read the book or are a massive tech nerd like I am, you’ll get the reference lol)

Truthfully, it’s been WAY too long since I last blogged or wrote a book review. There are a million reasons why that happened and I’ll share those in another post. I knew I missed blogging and sitting down to write this post feels like a breath of fresh air. So are you ready for a non-spoiler book review?? YAY!

I just finished “Girl Gone Viral” by Arvin Ahmadi last night and it definitely gets 4/5 stars. I really enjoyed the book and I’m hoping there will be a second one. Now let’s get to the reason you’re here… the review!

Let’s start with the synopsis of the book first:

Perfect for fans of Warcross and Black Mirror, Girl Gone Viral is the inventive and timely story of a seventeen-year-old coder’s catapult to stardom.

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 tried 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 the attention–she’s wanted for years?

I think we’ve all dreamed of “going viral” if you have ever uploaded content to the internet. Sometimes it happens once and is purely right timing and nothing more. Other times people work really hard to make a name for themselves on the internet and what are they willing to do for that fame?

“Girl Gone Viral” is more than just a story about a girl wanting to go well, go viral. This book is filled with mystery and suspense that keeps you engaged and wanting to solve the mystery of what happened to Opal’s dad.

As someone who has worked in tech and has always been a techie this book really spoke to my heart. For those of you who don’t know I worked for 6 years at Apple. This story takes place in Palo Alto, which is where the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs used to live. I went up there for 3 weeks to do training and got a taste of the Silicon Valley lifestyle. This book does an extremely good job of depicting that world in a not so far off future. The way people behave and act is also spot on and it brought me back to my days of working at Apple. So, I think in many ways I loved this book because I could truly connect with the setting and the characters.

Do you need to be a techie or have visited Silicon Valley to like the book? No! There are a lot of different characters throughout this story that will appeal to just about anyone. At times the characters felt a bit self-serving and at times like they were just going to keep making the same mistakes over and over again. That got a bit old after awhile but I still connected enough with them and wanted to solve the overall mystery that I found myself excusing those moments. Plus, I think in the grand scheme of the book their personalities make sense and you see how clouded their minds can become by the promise of more and more.

I don’t want to say anything else because I’m afraid I will spoil the story. I will highly recommend you pick up this book and give it a go. You’re reading this blog so you have some interest in technology and trust me, you’ll definitely get sucked into solving the mystery and caring for these characters.

Let me know your thoughts down below if you’ve read it and what you think! Happy Reading, Book Lovelies! <3