Mirkat Always Reading

I started this book right after finishing the first, so I guess Barry Lyga did something right!  This one starts six months after the end of the previous installment.  Kyra "Goth Girl" Sellers is back after her stay in a psych ward (where her father had sent her, afraid she was going to make her second suicide attempt).  One of the first things Kyra wants to do is to check on Fanboy to make sure he's okay, but she is soon angry to discover he's somehow too okay.  Suddenly, he's popular!  He's been serializing his graphic novel Schemata in the school's literary magazine, and his classmates are loving it.  This makes Kyra feel that he forgot all about her--out of sight, out of mind--and she becomes focused on "revenge."

For much of the narrative, I found myself hating Kyra and, in my head, yelling at her just to have a damn conversation with Fanboy.  Instead of making a chain of assumptions.  But she has to go through a certain journey before she can get there, and I find myself pulling for her to get through all that, because I can see her potential under the rage and lousy attitude.

This book has the sort of short chapters that propel a reader forward.  I'd find myself thinking, "Just one more chapter," because the chapter were often around 2.5 chapters.  I stayed up way too late a couple of nights reading this.  (And as indicated in the title, Fanboy's name finally gets revealed.)  I was pleased, for the most part, with the way this book resolved itself; however I kind of wish there were just a few more chapters.

As a side note, I will just point out that Kyra does not quite understand lucid dreams, and I'm not sure if the author intended this, or whether he himself shares that misunderstanding.  There is one chapter where Kyra describes a lucid dream, and she notes that in a lucid dream--which is one where the dreamer is aware of dreaming--it is possible to take control of the dream or just let it unfold.  But then there are things that happen in the dream that Kyra doesn't expect or necessarily want, and she questions whether she actually does want them--because it's a lucid dream, so she must be controlling what happens.  Only that's not true.  Having a lucid dream and taking control in the dream are two separate things.  The moment you know you're dreaming, you are lucid.  But taking control takes certain decisions within your dream world, and it's actually something that may take practice.  In case anyone is interested, there are websites devoted to explaining how to develop these skills.  (Huge digression over.)

I didn't touch on this with the first book, but I'm not sure why Fanboy is apparently the last person in the world who still uses dial-up and doesn't have a cell phone.