In Real Life

After reading the massive book The Way of Kings, I needed a lighter book and boy was this a great one.

In Real Life is a graphic novel about a teenage girl, Anda, who gets invited into a new online computer game where you can actually have a female avatar--it was published in 2014 and I wasn't into MMORPG's back then so I don't know if that was accurate or not. But she meets a friend in this female only club on this online game. This girl, Lucy/Sarge, has been around and they start going on missions where they kill cheaters, outside computer programs or humans who go around playing this game to collect coins so then companies can sell the online gold for real money (for people who don't want to have to spend hours and hours collecting monies the way you're supposed to). Anda and Lucy get paid real money for doing this. But then Anda meets one of these gold farmers, who in real life is a 16 year old kid in China just trying to make ends meet. They get talking and Anda tries to help him out, in game and in real life. But both cases greatly back fire and characters die.

It's a great story about how people online are people in real life too. They have their stories. They have their fits of rage. They have their sicknesses and flaws just like you do.

Anda's parents are great in here too. Anda's mom sets up parameters about the gaming and ends up taking away her internet access because of mistakes she makes online. (Such a good mom.) Online dangers and predators are discussed briefly on here as they are a real scary thing that can happen when you play games online.

The book was realistic, from how Anda appears compared to her avatar to predator danger to realizing that life isn't as simple as brief internet searches lead us to believe.