The Perpetual Motion Club - Sue Lange

[goodreads]

Title: The Perpetual Motion Club
Author: Sue Lange
Genre: sci-fi, YA
Rating: 3.5/5
# pages: 207 pages
Date read: August, 2013

Welcome to the high school of the future. The glee club is full of rock stars, the brainy kids hack permanent records, and the basketball players are as conceited as the cheerleaders. The walls are ablaze with six-foot-high logos of the hottest junk food, software, and clothing brands of the day. The popular kids are sponsored by Abercrombie, Microsoft, and Frito-Lay. You, on the other hand, can't even get a return text from Clearasil. Your best friend is a witch, your boyfriend a twerp. Your geometry teacher hates you and your mom is gleefully counting down the days until graduation. Guess it's time for another hit of iHigh.

This was a rather unusual futuristic novel in that it might actually just as well have taken place "now". It has none of the elements I'd usually associate with a novel taking place in the future. The focus was definitely on the characters and their interaction rather than on the elements that turned this into an alternative universe.

That's not necessarily a bad thing - it just stood out to me because of the way the book was marketed. As the rating indicates, I rather liked the book. It was definitely more character-driven than plot-driven, but I thought it worked quite nicely. It was a bit slow to start, but once it did move on from the initial setting of the stage, I enjoyed the various interactions. I was often infuriated by both the other memebers of the PMC and by Elsa's mother, but fortunately especially the latter redeemed herself nicely in the end :)