Listen

Listen
Rene Gutteridge
254 pages
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
Source: Free NookBook
★★☆☆☆

You can read the Goodreads summary here.

This novel had enormous potential.   The small, suburban town of Marlo is rocked when someone starts anonymously posting peoples private conversations on the Internet.  People are in an uproar, fighting openly in public after their conversations are published, trying to figure out who posted them and how they're doing it.

Though the author did touch on it a bit, here's where the author missed her amazing potential.  These days we are hearing a lot about cyber bullying going on in middle and high schools.  The cyber bullying is actually causing America's youth to commit suicide, just like one of the characters in the novel. This is the route Gutteridge should have taken her novel on a whole, which sounded like it was written YA but was so focused on adult lives.  I feel like Gutteridge should have gone straight up YA and focused more on the taunting the high school girls were doing and delve more into their awful MySpace pages, which were barely touched on.  By focusing her novel on the YA aspect and cyber bullying, she could have written a powerful novel that might have had some impact on this American crisis.

And that's why this novel gets two stars from me.  I liked it, but I feel like the focus was all over the place and it could have been better honed.