Growing Up Wired by David Wallace Fleming

From Amazon - "Can meaningful relationships survive a world of instant gratification? While on his computer, Victor Hastings admires the provocative pictures of the girl he's dating. Meanwhile, she's posting more and more on Facebook and all the social sites. Now everyone in his cramped college housing is competing for her attention. What kind of love is this? ...the wired kind. Growing up Wired - a coming-of-age, social media "love" story" 


This sounded like a parable for modern times and something that would provide some interesting thought provoking material. I like something a bit challenging so had high hopes for this book.


Victor is an Alpha boy, living in a frat house with other young men most of whom are far more adept with women than him. In the brave new age of the internet he passes his time surfing the web for porn. Soon many of his friends are browsing MySpace to find sexually suggestive pictures of the girls on campus. Victor is blamed for the frat house becoming insular and computer obssessed rather than full of visiting girlfriends. He is guided into a relationship with plenty of help from his more outgoing friends but finds himself questionning why she makes herself so available online yet so distant in person.


This book definitely gave me pause for thought, and made me think particularly about teenage girls I know who post pictures of themselves without apparently thinking about how wide the audience is. The world has changed with the advent of the internet and it's interesting to consdier how it is affecting some people's lives. However I found it took me a while to get into the book and when I did I couldn't really connect with the characters. They were a bit stereotypical and I didn't know enough about their backgrounds to begin to understand the main players. The story centres around the frat house which is something I know very little about as a Brit and perhaps that was part of the reason for the disconnect. While things happen in the book it felt like nothing really happened, and I was pleased when the narrative took the form of instant messages for a while as it picked up the pace a bit.


This book has some great reviews but I'm afraid the above combined with a sprinkling of typos meant it missed the spot for me.


Format: Kindle, review copy
My Rating: 2*