Hoverboards (eat your heart out, Marty McFly!), ARggles (Augmented Reality goggles, which, Terminator-like, project digital information on the real world, and come in a variety of designer colors) and Home Universe GeneratorTMs (which allow you to see other universes, but not touch) – the near future is a great time to be a kid!
Everybody thinks that Frieda “Fraidy” Katz is a fifteen year-old slacker who is coasting on gentlewoman cs. In fact, she is a math nerd who intentionally does poorly in her high school classes in order not to be bullied. Her plan is to turn it on in her final year so she can qualify to get into the Alternaut Academy, where she will study for her dream job: Dimensional Portal(TM) jockey for the Transdimensional Authority (the organization that monitors and polices travel between universes).
When she sees information behaving badly on her ARggles, she is intrigued and tracks down the person who created it, which becomes her path into a group of young hackers called The Motley Crewcuts. At first, Fraidy thinks she’s met her people (smart, snarky and really into computers), and goes along with their pranks. But as they escalate (starting with an attack on the centralized electronic control system of the hoverboards), she begins to have doubts about the morality of what they are doing. When she discovers that the group’s next target is her beloved Transdimensional Authority, she decides she must stop them. But can she? (SPOILER ALERT: She can. Probably. Maybe. Don’t you just hate spoilers?)
Fraidy’s Amazeballs ARggles Adventure is a humorous young adult science fiction novel that is 77,200 words long. It is a near future story that explores the role of electronic communications in the world of tech savvy teens, in the vein of Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail. In reviews, my adult novels have often been compared favorably to the work of Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), although the review comparison that really resonated with me was to the writing of Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues).
