ALA Booklist

Only 200 invites go out worldwide to participate in The Game, a competition for the smartest teens on the planet, and Tunde (an engineering genius from Nigeria) and Painted Wolf (an activist blogger from Shanghai) get two of them. Their Mexican American friend (and expert hacker) Rex invites himself along, and the three look forward to meeting in person for the first time. Each has important secondary reasons for going, but they must work together to unmask a darker purpose embedded in the competition. Gout's near-future novel mixes e-mails, different fonts, and Manning's diagrams, photos, and drawings into the prose to tell an up-to-the-minute story of global friendships and politics. Point of view alternates among the three main characters, and their voices are unique, especially that of Tunde, who often uses Nigerian pidgin (slang). The abundance of STEM concepts, action, and suspense will get all types of readers hooked on this new series. Try this with fans of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game (1984) or Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992).

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

This exciting series starter from filmmaker and producer Gout follows the lives of three teenage geniuses: Rex, an ace coder and the son of illegal Mexican immigrants; Tunde, an impoverished, self-taught Nigerian engineering prodigy; and Painted Wolf, a middle-class Chinese girl with a talent for ferreting out corruption. Best friends who have only met online, they get caught up in the Game, an international competition run by 18-year-old CEO Kiran Biswas, "the biggest name in technology, cybernetics, futurism, and design." Painted Wolf discovers hints that Biswas's ostensibly humanitarian motives are suspect and that he may actually be working with a corrupt Chinese industrialist and a vicious African warlord. It's a fast-moving story that presents its protagonists with intriguing moral choices, and all three bring thorny personal problems to the contest, too. Maps, photographs, schematic illustrations, faux security footage stills, and other artwork further build out the teens' high-stakes, high-surveillance, and highly interconnected world, as well as their various technological innovations. The right sort of techie reader should be riveted. Ages 12-up. (May)

School Library Journal (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Gr 5-8-While the myriad photographs are fascinating, the bigger draw here is the wonderfully simple explanations of some of Einstein's theories. For example, in clarifying the physicist's quantum theory of light, Delano says, "Simply put, Einstein showed that photons in the light beam knock the electrons out of metal." And, to make the concept of spacetime easier to understand, she asks readers to contemplate spacetime as a trampoline with a bowling ball resting on it. This visual perception helps to make the theory understandable for all students. The black-and-white and sepia photographs follow Einstein from boyhood to old age and show him in a variety of settings: at the blackboard, delivering a speech, taking the oath of U.S. citizenship, in his Princeton home with children who survived the Holocaust, and so on. Many have appeared elsewhere. Cartoon illustrations add to the clarity of the very readable text. Personal thoughts and feelings abound. To make Einstein human to the audience, his mistakes are mentioned, as well as his celebrity. Complete quote sources are appended. An introduction by Evelyn Einstein, the scientist's granddaughter, is included. This entertaining effort displays clarity and intelligence. It has plenty of information for reports and is also a good choice for browsing.-Anne Chapman Callaghan, Racine Public Library, WI Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.