Need
Reprint edition published April 4, 2017
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
By Joelle Charbonneau

Started March 26, 2018
Finished March 29, 2018
Pages 338

Brief synopsis:
Need takes place in the middle of a small Wisconsin town. The local high school students all receive a mysterious invitation to join a new social network called NEED. It is dark web meets real, everyday life. As students are asked to do ever more character changing tasks to receive what they think the need, the small community is struck by tragedy after tragedy. An interpretation of how selfish humans can be and a warning about how fast cyber bullying can take a turn to the unchangeable.

Why this book and why now:
My oldest is in middle school. His school librarian posed a challenge to all the students to read a series of six pre-selected books. Need is one of those books. While my son had no interest initially, my friend’s daughter (and my son’s classmate) did. I challenged her to read it with me and the reward would be a special outing to a local ceramics shop. She had already read four of the six, but wasn’t too keen on finishing the challenge. Well, game on! She’s already halfway through after just a couple of days.

I wasn’t too optimistic about a young adult/juvenile fiction book about cyber bullying would keep my interest, but since I had a middle schooler and knew that social media wasn’t going away, I thought this book would be a good conversation starter with both my son and his classmates.

There is plenty of content to start those conversations. From parent/young adult relationships, suicide, taking responsibility for your actions, and the importance of trust, if you have a teenager, it should be easy to find a story line to get your teen talking.

The overall pace and feel of the book had a Maze Runner meets Hunger Games on the internet vibe. Charbonneau introduced a lot of characters one short chapter at a time. There were so many characters and they did not spend much time face to face interacting that it was difficult to remember who was who. More time on developing the social structure and the who’s who at the beginning would have made it easy to understand the nuances that Charbonneau was trying to explain with characters like Jack and Gina . Their perception of self likely is very different then how their classmates viewed them and I think that would have added to the story development.

There were a few trigger topics that I was surprised to come across in the books. Especially for Bryan who had thoughts of suicide and discussed the methods he had considered. I would want any parent to know that this topic is broached in this book so that you can have a conversation with your pre-teen or teen. Having sons, I do worry that heartbreak or not meeting expectations and the resulting emotions will lead them to consider things with irreversible consequences.

Other difficult topics include, death of a parent, death of a classmate, anaphylaxis due to food allergies, adultery, siblings with a potentially terminal disease, murder, deceit and lying.

Recommended reading for:
While this book was suggested to middle school students, I would err on the side of 8th graders and older. The book revolves around high school students and the topics discussed are geared more toward a young adult stage of life. The romantic relationships are not physical, surprisingly so considering the number of times the teens are left alone.

If you are looking for a way to have a conversation with your kid about online behavior or just looking for a way to connect, this should be a book they are interested in reading and one that keeps a parent turning the pages without too many eye rolls.

The final word:
Need does not leave me needing more, but I am optimistic that it will give me a segue into deeper conversations with my son and his peers. Based on the pace and depth of the book, I think Charbonneau absolutely meets her target audience of young teens, giving them just enough to think about without the complication of overdone scene set ups. She takes advantage of their assumptions as to how a high school social structure works and allows them to project their own experiences within the story likely making the characters more relatable to them since they are filling in some of the gaps Charbonneau allowed.