2013 book 112

Austin Grossman's You
Normally it wouldn't occur to me to read a book about a slightly douchey guy in 1997 who takes a job at a video game company founded by his high school friends--but I LOVED Grossman's last book (one of the great novels about superheroes) and so will read anything by him. And this was actually much more up my alley than, say, Ready Player One (though I think fans of that book will also like this one). Even though I'm ten years younger than the characters and my current gaming consists of obsessively playing Pixel People on my iPhone, I certainly spent much of my childhood engrossed in games like King's Quest IV and Leisure Suit Larry 3 (I still have no idea why I was allowed to play the latter), and so could relate to a lot of what was going on here.

And none of that has anything to do with the book, really! Like I said, it's about a guy who goes to work for a company founded by several people he was friends with in high school (one of whom is thankfully a girl), but hasn't kept in touch with. And one of the founders died in an accident and no one can figure out his code. And our protagonist discovers a really . . . problematic bug, and has to get to the bottom of everything. Also, he's hallucinating the four main characters from the games. So then he plays every game the company's made; at first, this is a nice look into video game history, but by the endless descriptions of outer space games I was waaaay over this conceit and ready for STUFF to happen. Luckily stuff happens, more or less, and the ending is fine.

Notes of interest:
--Grossman is a video game designer, which is why so much of this rings true.
--Grossman is Lev Grossman's twin brother.
--This is a serious dude book. The only girls are the awesome programmer (who serves in a literal support role, and whose personality/thoughts we don't see at all) and the requisite sexy but nice video game character. 

I liked this pretty well, but not nearly as much as the one about a supervillain. B.
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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book is available now.