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Gotcha! (2008)

by Shelley Hrdlitschka(Favorite Author)

3.49 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1551437376 (ISBN13: 9781551437378)

languge

English

genre

Young Adult Fiction

publisher

Orca Book Publishers

review 1: I probably never would have picked this book up on my own. Anna talked about it in book club and I realized that the story line pretty closely followed an actual incident at Raleigh Charter High School earlier this year, although nothing bad happened as at the end of this book, and I decided to read it. At Raleigh Charter, so I'm told by a student there who's in my Sunday School class, some people decided to play a game, simply referred to as "the game" in which everyone paid $5 to join and then was given a target, another player, to mark with a red marker. There were immunities that changed from day to day, such as pinning your baby picture to your shirt, that made you safe from the person hunting you as long as you were wearing it. These immunities were posted on Faceboo... morek each night. The rules were very similar to those of Gotcha!, with a few differences: first, it was mainly carried on at school; second, the teachers had to idea what was going on (the students just said it was a "Facebook thing"); and third, so far as I know, no one got all that mad about losing. My friend actually got really far in the game, and although she was upset she got tagged, she wasn't about to kill anyone.So, what do I think of the book? Well, first of all, the drama is a bit too exaggerated. Katie and Paige react way too strongly to things: Katie when she decides she really wants to win Gotcha as well as when she realizes she's been tricked into losing (but she still gets what she wants, so why is she so upset?), and Paige when Katie snaps at her. I know not a single person in real life who would hate her best friend for ever after just for saying something like that. Then there was the whole issue with all the things gone wrong from Gotcha, from the kid in the wheelchair to what the mob did to Warren; I don't think most people would ever get that angry over a class game, and I don't think life-devastating mistakes would happen very often at all. I also disliked Katie for trying to make money off of money she's supposed to be protecting, plus what kind of person believes it when people say their money is guaranteed to triple if they invest it with them? However, I don't want to make it seem like this book is terrible and all I have to say is bad stuff. It had a pretty good story and was what I call a "chick flick novel", basically an easy read with plenty of fluff but a bit of substance to balance it out a bit. It doesn't really bring up any relevant issues, so it's definitely not the kind of book that makes you want to be a better person after reading it, and it's neither dense nor difficult to understand. This book would probably be good for girls who like other chick flick novels like Beastly. Unfortunately I'm not at all interested in chick flicks, so even though I don't like this book that's not to say it's a bad book. It's just not my style.
review 2: The premise of this book really appealed to me. Sadly, however, the book was poorly written. Really poorly written. It used every cliche known to YA novels (the absent father, the popular best friend, emails using every 'teen' shortcut available (c u l8r), etc.). The cliches were bad, but the dialogue was worse. It sounded like a middle age adult trying to sound like a teen. She never had me believing that a teen was speaking - I was all too aware of the author, which made it impossible to let go and escape into the book. less

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