Click'd

by Tamara Ireland Stone

[Leah]

It’s to my eternal shame that I have never read one of Tamara Ireland Stone’s books - I own them all, I just haven’t yet managed to actually read one, until now! I loved the sound of Click’d as soon as it appeared on Netgalley - I love reading about people who can code, Ashley at Nose Graze is one of my favourite blogs because of how magical she is at creating plug-ins and themes and stuff. Click’d is a pretty special read, it makes me itch to want to learn to code, but I just know I do not have the patience for it - I couldn’t do what Allie does, when she’s trying to fix Click’d, my head would explode, I’d be incredibly angry and I’d likely just swear at it and wish it dead.

I was so impressed with Allie - and Nathan. To be twelve years old and able to build an app from scratch? Boy, is that impressive. I have mad respect for their skills, because at 12 years old I was basically prettying up my Neopets page; very, very badly, I might add. The whole concept of Click’d is absolutely brilliant. It’s basically the friend version of Tinder, and I love it. I find making friends one of the hardest things in the world, I have done since I was a teenager and my closest friend now, lives in Canada. And I’ve never actually met her in person. Sure, there are people at work I talk to, but would I consider them friends? No. Making friends is hard and it’s especially hard when everyone my age is engaged or having babies and it just feels like you’re out of the loop. So something like Click’d, that would give me like-minded friends (preferably bookish ones) with the same interests would be amazing! I would download it for sure.

Click’d is such a fast-paced read. It’s super short, just over 200 pages and has graphics in the form of the top 10 lists that get created once you click on Click’d although in ebook form they’re hard to really see and understand, so the pages really do fly by. Allie and Nathan are great characters, I liked how they started off as enemies, how Allie saw him as the bad guy, but how they came through for each other as the novel progressed. I loved the geekiness of the novel. I am all in for books about people who code, it just gives me so much admiration. It’s so easy to see Candy Crush and play it (and rage at it, if you’re as bad at it as I am) without realising all the work that must go into each and every app we use. Nathan’s Built app also sounded amazing, by the way. I love the idea of building houses and the sponsorship and helping to build *actual* houses. It goes to show that middle graders are thoughtful, they do try to help the world out a bit.

I really enjoyed Click’d. It was such a fun read and it’s title on Netgalley  hints that this is book one? So maybe this is a new series? And we’ll get more from Allie, Nathan and her friends and the Click’d app? I hope that’s true, because I’d love to see the kids grow up. Very rarely do we see middle graders become high-schoolers, and it would be so cool to follow Allie and Nathan’s progress - do they take the coding thing seriously and do it for like jobs? Do their apps go global? Y’know, there’s tons of scope and obviously, the important question, JUST HOW MUCH DO THEY LIKE EACH OTHER NOW? Even in middle grade books, I like to have a ship. This was an incredible read, I raced through it and barely paused for breath!