Be More Chill

I love Ned Vizzini's writing! "It's Kind of a Funny Story" is among my all time favorites, and although this wasn't as good, it was still excellent. It tells the story of a kid who gets a squib, a little voice in his head that tells him what to do to be cool. As well as being hilarious, it really

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shows the ridiculous lengths kids will go to to be cool.

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AMAZING! This book exploits the peer pressure faced by everyone growing up in the 21st century. Painfully honest and clever. This is a must-read.

What teens say:

LOVED IT! This book was too funny. I would never imagine someone doing that in real life. I would recommend this to many of my friends. I hope he writes a sequel.

It was rude so I stopped reading it.

I actually really liked this book. It was very good. I gave it a 3 for popularity

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because you kind of have to like the whole ghost and father to like the book. The thing I kind of didn’t like was the whole deal where they changed characters between Maxine and Imogene—it confused me at times. Other than that, GREAT book.

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Vizzini uses sci-fi/fantasy to create a satire of contemporary high school social mores. Anti-climatic ending though.

Not nearly as funny or poignant as It's Kind of a Funny Story, but with similar themes.

Be More Chill by Ned Vizzini, haha what can I say? A great and hilarious book. Definitely more for high school students and I would be more likely to recommend it to boys than girls.

This book is a quick read and entertaining. The pacing was good, and it was definitely funny. I also think the author did a good job ending it--I was very curious how he was going to pull that off. I'm not going to lie and say it was entirely comfortable to be inside the head of a teenage

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boy...things I sort of wish Jeremy would have kept to himself (his obsession with furries, for example), but overall it was an engaging voice, especially after the squip. Pre-squip, Jeremy seemed so exaggeratedly awkward that he seemed like he was on the autism spectrum or something, and I could see the need for a dramatic difference between the two, but at first I had a hard time getting a read on exactly what kind of nerd Jeremy was. It was also tough to get a real read on Christine, although I suppose that was part of the point--she's so tough to read, she even stumps the squip. Overall, a funny (if slightly gross) book with an interesting premise.

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This was an enjoyable book. I really liked the true to life portrayal of high school, cliques, and the importance to teenagers of being accepted. We all want that magic pill...rather it be for weight loss, intelligence, or beauty. Parents should be aware that there are sexual references in the

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book, but it is nothing compared to what teens see on tv, hear on the radio, or experience in real life.

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Jeremy Heere, at the bottom of the high school social hierarchy, spends his days being bullied by his social betters and keeping “humiliation sheets” that document his dork and loser status. Jeremy hangs out with his one dork friend, lusts after the beautiful Christine and spends his nights

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masturbating to internet porn and firmly believes that ”being Cool is obviously the most important thing on earth…”. Jeremy wants to get laid but doesn’t know how and life as a loser looks settled for Jeremy until he finds out about the squib, a microcomputer you swallow that tells you how to talk, and dress and how to be cool. Suddenly, Jeremy is the coolest kid in high school and he finds out that things don’t always turn out as you expect them to. (12/06) GRADE 8+ 12/06

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. I really liked the pace of this book. However, I have to say that I think this book should only be read by much older teens. The book sometimes frightened me, because it was basically written straight from the ideas and thoughts of a young teenage boy. Some of the vivid and sexual experiences

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were discussed at great length and detail. The book had a very humorous tone that kept me interested in what Jeremy and the squip were going to come up with next. This book also accurately portrays how devious young adults can be when it comes to bullying inside of high school. Teens can relate to this story because of the portrayal of high school cliques and the social awkwardness of some teens. The end of this book was not clear cut and it was left up to the reader to decide if the two get together in the end. I think that this unconventional way of ending this book adds to the character of this book.

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I wasn't sure that this should have been a book for teens, as there seemed to be a lot of foul language and a fee adult situations. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book and would have loved to have a computer of my own in my brian when I was teen :)

Not nearly as good as Vizzini's other books. He still writes the Teen Boy voice amazingly well, but the story itself--about a gawky high-school boy who gets an implant that will teach him how to be cooler--reads like a flimsy knock-off of Feed. Like his other novels, Vizzini's protagonist is a

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thinly-veiled device for exorcising Vizzini's own outcast demons from high school, but somehow this book doesn't hold together as well. Be More Chill is a series of plot points, and lacks the emotional ground his other books cover.

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Heartbreaking and funny, sensitive and crude, BMC is more good than bad but, to this reader, flawed by over-the-top adult content. Jeremy Heere is a loser. Worse, he is a victim of quiet, stealth bullying... his Humiliation Sheet --his daily tally of the various insults and injuries he endures-- is

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a thing of terrible truth. Nonetheless Jeremy has his heart and eyes set on Chrstine. When offered the chance to take a "Squip" an ingestable AI device, Jeremy doesn't hesitate. So begins the Squip's job to makeover Jeremy into a cool, desirable object. The lessons are sociologically spot-on and brutal: treat your friends with cool disdain, keep girls waiting, make sexual advancements by coersion, do drugs (in one notable scene, Jeremy does Ecstasy) break the law, and more. Of course, the whole Makeover breaks down with horrible results and Jeremy 'fesses up. His parents seem a bit too quick to forgive and the ending is pat. Christine remains the one unsullied character: smart, funny, and never fooled by Jeremy's antics.

Sexual scenes (some graphic), language, and drug use relegate this book to a more mature audience... had Vizzini been a bit more... restrained... I would put BMC on my must-read list for teens. Some of the social insights, cliques, group dynamics, and dialogue are spot-on.

On a final note: BMC impossible to read without thinking about the author's own fate... so sad.

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Am I being too harsh? I thought this book was rather predictable. The protagonist was a nerd until he takes a chill pill and becomes Cool by way of a mini super computer that instructs him in the ways of coolness. Of course, there are consequences when he dumps his true friends just to be Cool and

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he learns his lesson -- be who you are.

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Jeremy hears about a “squip,” a sort of computerized pill. You take it and the mini-computer tells you how to act, what to wear, what to say. Jeremy takes the squip and pretty soon, he’s making out with the popular girls. He’s wearing the right clothes, saying the right things that make

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people laugh. And at last, Christine notices him. But computers crash. How long can Jeremy’s squip last? Lib notes: Swear words, lots of sexual situations. Cartoonish adults. Idea of squip is interesting but execution stumbled. Various squip websites created by the author...kinda crass marketing for the book!

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Excellent story about a high school loser who uses a black market "drug" (cpu in a pill) to become cool, and what the ramifications are to slavishly going to a device for advice and validation.

Incredibly, this was written several years before the iPhone was released and at the very start of social

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media. Prescient, amusing and thought provoking, and written in an interesting and contemporary style.

The stage musical based on this is also excellent, although its story follows a slightly bigger arc.

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This book teaches you to treat people like shit, do drugs, steal from your parents, and suck on infected nipples.

A teen dork gets a computer in his head that tells him what to do and how to be cool. Kind of like “Upgrade” without the body control or “Venom” without the symbiote. The

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computer is a huge asshole, which is pretty much what I expected. Its only purpose is to get our hero to climb the social ladder, with no regard for the little people or whose feelings get hurt along the way. You’ve seen this in sitcoms all the time. It’s like “pick-up artistry for kids”.

All girls are sluts, all guys are horndogs, all adults are useless. Even the dad calls everything “gay”. Aren’t we passed that already? I can’t believe this book got so many awards for being “realistic teen fiction”. There are way more parties and drugs than there should be. All this book does is encourage the “I have to dress the way everyone does, I have to talk the way everyone does” groupthink mentality that turns everyone into Abercrombie zombies.

The worst part is the ending. I can’t talk about it without spoiling so stop reading this paragraph. The computer advises him to break character in the middle of the play, a play that’s been going on since the beginning of the novel, and announce his love for this girl he’s been pining for all the time (basically the high school equivalent of a marriage proposal). Also this takes place a day after two students were burned in a house fire. And the computer thinks it’s a good idea to, at this exact time, announce himself to everyone in the audience and take all the attention away from grief for the burn victims, the people who’ve been working on the play, the audience who came to see it, and make it all about him. It’s the dumbest plot point I ever saw. No one in their right mind would advise that kind of move. ELIZA has more intelligence than that.

I don’t think the author hates women, but he doesn’t know how to write women. All he knows is what he thought women were in high school, or what is gleaned from “Beverly Hills 90210” and “Sixteen Candles“. Checkout “Booksmart” for a better example of nerds trying to party that isn’t so misogynistic. This is what we talk about when we say “the author’s responsibility”.

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I've been listening to the Be More Chill original musical cast recording and enjoying the sound of the music while not necessarily understanding all the words yet. (Living with me is a hellish experience of hearing songs sung with the lyrics I think I heard or improving the lyrics to what I think

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they should be.) Since I probably won't have a chance to see the actual show for quite a while yet, I thought I'd read the original book to help me understand the plot. Also, there's a graphic novel adaptation I want to read next.

So, yeah, this book is sexist crap. A nerdy, lustful teen boy swallows a mind-reading micro quantum computer to teach him to become a cool womanizer. This plot was old when Jerry Lewis swallowed a serum to become Buddy Love. It's Cyrano de Bergerac tossing his heart and wandering into John Hughes' Weird Science.

For a bit of shock value, Keanu Reeves and Eminem are referenced in bizarre ways.

From what I can glean from my first listen of the album, the plot of the musical was tweaked in several ways. I'm going to read the CD booklet to find out exactly what I've not been hearing. Regardless, some of the songs are catchy, and I can always fix them when I sing along in the future.

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Entertaining and light, this wish-fulfillment fantasy kept me fully engaged on the train from Toledo to Chicago. The high-school aged protagonist was unbelievably awkward at the beginning and it was fun to watch his computer-aided transition into one of the cool kids. Naturally, consequences occur.

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Any book with a Shakespeare play (in this case A Midsummer Night's Dream) in the storyline gets extra points from me. I didn't really connect with any of the characters but I found them all likable enough.

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Recommended: NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
This book was insulting to women for the way they are treated and viewed, and insulting to men for the idiotic and disgusting way they are portrayed as acting. I believe "vile" or "foul" would be a great way to sum this book up.

Beyond the outright misogyny and

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objectification here, it was genuinely idiotic. The magic liquid needed is Mountain Dew? Was this written by a horny fourteen year old? Because that is exactly what it felt like. This seems like something a lonely, horny fourteen year old boy might write.

The fact that it gets praise and has been adapted into a musical is vaguely terrifying to me. I don't understand if those reading this are just also misogynistic idiots, and so love it because it reflects them, or if they are somehow desperately blind to that entirely, which is possibly worse.

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