The Last Life of Lori Mills by Max Boucherat
| The Last Life of Lori Mills by Max Boucherat | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: A love-letter to the gaming world, as a girl finds her constructed reality hit by a malevolent spirit from the depths of the servers. Crafted? You will find it so. "Mine!" you'll declare, too, as this one's a keeper. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 288 | Date: July 2024 |
| Publisher: Harper Collins Children's Books | |
| ISBN: 9780008666484 | |
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We meet Lori on the first evening she's got the house to herself – no neighbour to pop in, babysitter poorly, mother at work, just an avidly rule-breaking eleven year old, on her lonesome. What could possibly go wrong? Snuggled in a blanket fort, she has one main intention, and that is to log on to Voxminer, the world-building, critter-collecting game that is a hit in Lori's world. But first Lori has a tiny inkling that this stormy night doesn't find herself entirely on her own, and then she finds something even more spooky. For the server she and her bestie and nobody else should be able to enter shows signs of tampering. When malevolent eyes spark up on her phone screen, and her safe place in the game has been doctored – well, where is a girl to turn?
Well, we soon find out that it barely matters. This is a wonderful evocation of those home-invasion, I Know What You Screamed At Last Summer movies, perfectly fit for the 10-13 age range. Lori's house, even if she thought she'd made it perfect for the evening alone, is not playing ball, and in her game things are even weirder. For there is evidence that someone or something has access to Lori's real life – her school, even her bedroom door and what lies behind it...
What this results in is a mish-mash of drama that might have been a bit more coherent at times – the story is in the game and in her world and in neither, and with the game affected in slightly illogical ways so too is the whole experience here. But that's not to say this is ever a failure. The chapter numbers reducing from 40 to 1 is an unneeded gimmick, for the pages are rapidly turned, not least through some of the pages having a layout as if it was concrete poetry, and some chapters consisting of four letters.
I love that quirky, House of Leaves style of rule-breaking, and the target reader is going to latch on to a lot here besides that. Nested SMS conversations, chatboxes in the game – there is a lot they will pick up on and recognise as very much of their world. I thought at times the description of the game a touch laboured, as if unsure people would actually understand how the thing works, but those moments came and went as quickly as did everything else.
The joy remained with me for hours, mind, for factor in the whole point of all this, the ultimate message and reason for this story, and you have an outright success. In among its slight ungainliness you have a genuine creepiness, a great and greatly likeable lead character, and despite my caveats still one of prose's better evocations of the gaming experience. The right audience will cherish this as much as anything they've made from manipulating pixels.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy. Black Hole Cinema Club by Christopher Edge does a similar thing, very differently – taking young heroes into the very fabric of their entertainment for pell-mell adventure.
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Last Life of Lori Mills by Max Boucherat at Amazon.com.
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