Starred Review Ahmadi's sophomore novel, following Down and Across (2018), is a thrilling, out-of-this-world experience for any reader. Coding is 17-year-old Opal Hopper's life. For a young woman who can create anything she can dream, it's heartbreakingly frustrating that she cannot conjure up her missing father or even find a glimmer of a trail to locate him. Her hope of one day finding him is renewed with the announcement of a virtual reality contest. The award includes a meeting with the billionaire developer her father once worked for. Opal is determined to win the contest at any cost en if it means hacking, cheating, lying, and unearthing murder. Ahmadi delivers a breathless, sweeping story without shying away from heavy themes like grief, morality, and mental health. Opal is a girl who enjoys all the benefits of being labeled a prodigy, but she quickly comes to realize how easy it is to become tangled in the web of attention and fame. Like all great sf stories, this leaves readers with some weighty questions to ponder at the close of the book, and how much of our privacy we're willing to sacrifice for personalized web content is one of them. This thought-provoking question, particularly in a moment when we are starting to grapple with this exact issue, will make this even more relevant to teens.

In a near-future America, Opal Hopper, a senior at a school for high-achieving hackers and coders, enters a contest on the virtual reality platform WAVE. Winning would launch her tech career and introduce her to WAVE's reclusive founder, who might help her find her missing father. The richly inventive digital landscape is a dizzying acceleration of today's internet environment. High-stakes ethical tech dilemmas, trolls, sexual harassers, and corporate manipulation keep the tension simmering.

On a quest to find her missing father, a teen and her friends create a virtual reality experience that goes viral.Seventeen-year-old Opal Hopper has a talent for coding, an entertainer's instincts, and an entrepreneur's drive for disruption. She's also haunted by an old mystery: Why did her father disappear, and what is his old partner, Howie Mendelsohn, keeping secret? When Howie's firm, Palo Alto Labs, launches a contest on their VR platform, offering the winner a chance to meet with Howie himself, Opal leaps at the chance to get some answers—even if it means stealing private data. But every strategic step that this smart, complex heroine takes toward fame, fortune, and closure lands her on shakier moral ground and stretches her loyalties. The absorbing narrative takes readers to a near future where smart-voice assistants, self-driving Teslas, the Hyperloop, and delivery drones are du jour. But men still run the big tech companies, female entrepreneurs still struggle with harassment and inequity, and anti-technology movements are on the rise. Despite the unsatisfying ending, Opal's journey raises good questions: Can we be better than our internet selves? What if we allowed computers to track our most private thoughts and feelings? Could robots and humans live in harmony? The answers, of course, are still under development. Opal is assumed white and her best friend is Nigerian.An immersive ride through the near future with a compelling heroine at the helm. (Science fiction. 12-17)

In this near-future thriller, Ahmadi (Down and Across) questions the benefits of technology and its role in creating instant celebrity, shortening attention spans, and insidiously impacting democracy. When 17-year-old coder Opal Tal-s father, Aaron, went missing seven years earlier, she attempted to track him down by reaching out to his business partner, Howie Mendelsohn. But Opal-s requests were ignored. Now legally known as Opal Hopper and a senior at Palo Alto Academy of Science and Technology, she is given an opportunity to meet Howie by entering the Make-a-Splash competition on WAVE, a virtual reality social media site that Howie created. All Opal has to do is give up her privacy and become a viral media sensation, which she and her friends do using ill-gotten information about how people react to an infamous personality-s very public emotional breakdowns. The narrative blends with texts, transcripts, and other technologies, sometimes affecting pacing, but Ahmadi-s relatable characters keep the story engaging. Ages 12-up. Agent: Tina Wexler, ICM Partners. (May)