Deadly Pink. By Vivian Vande
Velde. Harcourt. $16.99.
Every decade or so,
Vivian Vande Velde revisits the world of Rasmussem Corporation, creator of
video games that go just a bit beyond the video games of whatever decade we are
in at the time. First came User Unfriendly (1991), a role-playing
game in the once-popular sword-and-sorcery mode in which one of the players’
mothers, of all people, turns out to have a crucial role. Then came Heir
Apparent (2002), a game with a medieval setting that gets messed up, with
possibly fatal real-world effects, by protesters who are against the whole
notion of video gaming (an outdated premise if there ever was one, but clever
at the time the book was written).
And now we have Deadly Pink, as intriguing in 2012 as
the earlier books were in their time, and driven not by technology gone bad but
by human concerns and relationships – a very effective approach that is likely
to have some staying power. The book’s
protagonist is 14-year-old Grace Pizzelli, whose 18-year-old sister, Emily, has
been working for Rasmussem and is now stuck in a not-yet-released Rasmussem
game – not because of some technical flaw but of her own volition, according to
a real-world note that Emily has left behind.
This is no dungeons-and-dragons or medieval role-playing game, either,
but a syrupy, sweet one intended for young girls. “This game looked like PBS programming for
kids barely old enough to spell PBS,” comments Grace when she first visits the
virtual world. Grace has to go there to
try to rescue Emily from – well, what, exactly?
That is the basic mystery here: why is Emily staying in virtual reality
when she has a great life – better, in fact, than Grace’s entirely average
one? Grace laments that Emily is
prettier, smarter, has more friends and is better-liked by just about everyone
than Grace herself is – but is so nice that Grace cannot even resent her for
it. Grace is simply average; nothing
awful but nothing special, either. And
she does not have Emily’s knowledge, understanding or experience of Rasmussem
virtual gaming, an immersive experience that in the real world is now probably
not far in the future.
But Grace has to go
into the game to find Emily and try to persuade her to come out, because
Rasmussem officials have already tried to do that and failed, and the girls’
parents are no help: their mom is hysterical as well as totally uninformed
about role-playing games, and their dad is out of town and doesn’t understand
gaming either. So Grace-the-ordinary has
to prove that she is not ordinary after all by doing something that no one else
has been able to do – a common plot line for Vande Velde’s Rasmussem books, for
many of her other novels as well, and in fact for a large number of books
intended for preteens and young teenagers.
Grace initially
doesn’t have a clue what to do, of course: “I had no idea how I was supposed to
talk sense into Emily. Surely she knew
she couldn’t stay hooked up to the equipment indefinitely. That she was risking brain injury, or even
death.” Well, yes, Emily does know all
that – Rasmussem builds safeguards into its games to prevent people from
staying in them for too long, and Emily has deliberately overridden the
protections. So what exactly is going on
here? Deadly Pink is particularly attractive because of Vande Velde’s
decision to place the action in a game tailor-made for what Rasmussem officials
tell Grace that focus groups say little girls like: a world of “pink and
lavender and lilac and violet and teal.
Any self-respecting boy would be gagging already.” And a world filled with unicorns and dolphins
and kittens and swans, plus some dragons and dinosaurs for girls with a more
adventure-oriented orientation. The
contrast between a virtual world that is not supposed to be deadly and the
real-world concerns of people who want to prevent Emily from living permanently
in that world – or dying in it – is effective; and if Grace’s lack of
personality is a flaw in the novel (she really does seem to be pretty much a tabula rasa), her slow realization of
her own abilities makes the book quite satisfying for its target audience, and
a worthy addition to what might be thought of as Vande Velde’s “Rasmussem
Chronicles.”
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