Very LeFreak

Very LeFreak

Very LeFreak has a problem: she’s a crazed technology addict. Very can’t get enough of her iPhone, laptop, IMs, text messages, whatever. If there’s any chance the incoming message, call, text, or photo might be from her supersecret online crush, she’s going to answer, no matter what. Nothing is too important: sleep, friends in mid-conversation, class, a meeting with the dean about academic probation. Soon enough, though, this obsession costs Very everything and everyone. Can she learn to block out the noise so she can finally hear her heart? Rachel Cohn makes her Knopf solo debut with this funny, touching, and surely recognizable story about a girl and the technology habit that threatens everything. Grade 10 Up—Meet Very (short for Veronica) LeFreak (from the disco-era song of the same name—"C'est Chic!"), a modern party girl with eclectic musical tastes. She is 100 percent plugged in to her electronic life as a freshman at Columbia University and not quite so attached to mundane concerns like going to class and managing her finances. Famous on campus for her creation of "The Grid," an online dorm social-networking site, and for organizing off-kilter flash-mob events and killer parties, Very skids from coasting to possible expulsion and scholarship loss. Brian, a best bud, until she sleeps with him; Jennifer, the roommate Very insists on calling Lavinia; and an irate RA stage an intervention at the behest of the dean. Very needs to go cold turkey and give up her total reliance on electronics. No iPod, no iPhone, no laptop. And that means no searching for her missing online crush. After things turn even uglier, the second half of Very's story takes place at a 28-day ESCAPE (Emergency Services for Computer-Addicted Persons) program at a former fat farm in Vermont. There, Very will have to learn to sink or swim after her forced break from technology. With the quiet blaring, she might have the time to figure out a future, or she just might go so crazy that she falls off the wagon into an untenable virtual existence with emoticons in place of relationships. Very's unique take on the world brings plenty of humor and a vicarious ride through racy modern college life.— Suzanne Gordon, Peachtree Ridge High School, Suwanee, GA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. It’s the second semester of freshman year for Very (short for Veronica) at New York’s Columbia University, and things are either going splendidly or catastrophically, depending on who you ask. Self-described as “a freak and a slut and a very bad student,” Very is the bisexual queen of campus, creator of the Grid (a wildly popular underground student-body networking site), and organizer of flash mobs and parties that are as legendary as they are illegal. Her imminent flunking out has to do with her inability to concentrate—why would she listen to her professor when she could be iTunes-ing, instant messaging, or meme-ing? Cohn creates a wondrous, sometimes breathtaking character with Very, a wholly believable modern-day multitasker who is unabashedly sexual. That’s why the second half of the book is something of a disappointment: Very is entered into a tech-rehab facility, wherein too-easy psychoanalysis makes rote what was so fabulously free. Teens who identify with the protagonist may feel betrayed by the switcheroo, though their admiration for the engrossing character will not ebb. Grades 10-12. --Daniel Kraus Rachel Cohn is also the author of Gingerbread, Cupcake, and Shrimp; and, with David Levithan, is the coauthor of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist and Naomi & Ely’s No Kiss List. She lives and writes in Manhattan. Chapter 1 Happy Birthday to You, Very LeFreak It wasn’t the fact that Starbucks did not—would not—serve Guinness with a raw egg followed by an espresso chaser that was ruining Very’s hangover. Nor was Very concerned that she had stumbled into her campus Starbucks on the morning after an overnight “study session” with the beautiful engineering major from Ghana whose name eluded her, although Very knew there were many hard consonants involved. Hey, she wasn’t even bothered that yesterday she’d been fired from her work-study “security” job checking student IDs—a feat that, contrary to her university career services advisor, was not, like, impossible to pull off—yet Very probably could be counted on later today to blow the remaining credit on her maxed-out card for primary wants like new headphones rather than for secondary needs such as food and tuition. The fact was, Very wasn’t even technically hungover, unless a sugar coma from late-night Cap’n Crunch consumption, along with several rounds of Red Bull, qualified. It was the excessive inhale of birthday cake and cereal that had done Very in. Like the mild, fully clothed spooning session—rather, study session—with Ghana that had closed out the birthday party her dorm had thrown her, the sugar infusion had felt so comfor