by Margo Kelly
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Published: September 18, 2014
Publisher: Merit Press
Genre: YA
Hardback: 240 pages
Rating: 5
Thea’s overprotective parents are driving her insane. They invade her privacy, ask too many questions, and restrict her online time so severely that Thea feels she has no life at all. When she discovers a new role-playing game online, Thea breaks the rules by staying up late to play. She’s living a double life: on one hand, the obedient daughter; on the other, a girl slipping deeper into darkness. In the world of the game, Thea falls under the spell of Kit, an older boy whose smarts and savvy can’t defeat his loneliness and near-suicidal despair. As Kit draws soft-hearted Thea into his drama, she creates a full plate of cover stories for her parents and then even her friends.
Soon, Thea is all alone in the dark world with Kit, who worries her more and more, but also seems to be the only person who really “gets” her. Is he frightening, the way he seems sometimes, or only terribly sad? Should Thea fear Kit, or pity him? And now, Kit wants to come out of the screen and bring Thea into his real-life world. As much as she suspects that this is wrong, Thea is powerless to resist Kit’s allure, and hurtles toward the same dark fate her parents feared most. Ripped from a true-life story of Internet stalking, Who R U Really? will excite you and scare you, as Thea’s life spins out of control.
My two-bits:
Quite a statement (scary one) in regards to internet predators, despite precautions and safety measures parents may take to protect kids.
This story creates the awareness for all who are new and naive to the internet world. It got me thinking of online identities those real and fake.
And got me thinking of how I use and interact on the internet. How important is it to be connected through it?
Beware and be careful when online.
Guest post:
Introducing Kit from Who R U Really? by Margo Kelly
One of the most significant characters in Who R U Really? is Kit.
He is the endearing boy that the main character, Thea, falls for in the story. Kit is short for his online user name, Kitsuneshin, which is a Japanese term meaning young fox. In theory, Kit is a sad teenager seeking out friends in an online role playing game. However, Kit is a figment of online imagination. He is basically a puppet, and the puppeteer is someone we should all be afraid of … or at least consciously aware of … because the puppeteer is manipulating the situation and as a result, manipulating the other players in the game, especially Thea.
While this character in the story is a work of fiction, the inspiration for him came from a real life event that happened to my own daughter.
The plot of Who R U Really? offers up several fictional characters for readers to suspect as the puppeteer behind Kitsuneshin, and I won’t give away the details of that story here. But I will tell you that in real life, this guy had convinced my daughter (who was eleven going on twelve at the time) that he was a nineteen-year-old boy who needed a friend. In fact he was about three decades older.
Who R U Really? is primarily a work of fiction, but the essence of the plot is what happened when my daughter was nearly abducted. This book was born with the hopes of helping others spot and unmask internet predators.
READ more about Kit...
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