Josh MacCallum is ten years old and having a hard time. He
lives in a small California
desert town with his single mother and baby sister, is a genius, and has just
been skipped forward in school a second time, making him two years younger than his classmates.
Friendless, he is bullied constantly. It’s no real surprise when, in a fit of
anger, he cuts his wrists. His panicked mother agrees to look into The Academy,
a school for gifted youngsters affiliated with a university. Despite her
reservations, the school seems to fit Josh’s needs, as well as being offered at
no cost. For the first time Josh starts to make friends and is actually in a
group of his peers. Things look happy.
But things start going wrong quickly- students are
committing suicide at an alarming rate. Mysterious sounds are heard at night.
And the ‘special seminar’ that Josh and his new best friend, Amy, are invited
to join is downright creepy. It’s
supposed to be about artificial intelligence, but it really seems to be more
about how living brains work. The head of the Academy, Dr. Engersol, seems all
too bent on isolating brains from body.
It’s really hard to write about this book without giving
huge spoilers. Suffice it to say that what Josh uncovers is a truly skin
crawling situation, that bad things happen to good people, and that it’s
reasonably well written. The book was written 20 years ago and features
computers and how they are interconnected, so one must remember what the state
of computer technology was like back then to realize how freaky some of the
things that happen in the book must have seemed to readers back then- there was
no World Wide Web and modems connected your computer directly to another
computer through the phone lines, not routing through a server. Some of the
story is predictable, but there are surprises, particularly an unhappy twist at
the end.
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