Bookshelf: So Yesterday

Author: Scott Westerfeld

First line: "We are all around you."

Summary (from book back cover):

Ever wonder who was the first kid to keep a wallet on a big chunky chain, or wear way-too-big pants on purpose? What about the mythical first guy who wore his baseball cap backwards? These are the Innovators, the people at the peak of the cool pyramid. 
Seventeen-year-old Hunter Braque is a Trendsetter, on the second level of the pyramid. His job: find the newest, coolest thing for the retail market. His MO: observe, don't get involved. 
But he has to get involved when he and his crush, Jen, discover his boss' cell phone in an abandoned building--and his boss missing. Hunter and Jen are soon snared in a web of brand-name intrigue: a missing cargo of the coolest shoes they've ever seen, ads for products that don't exist, and a shadowy group dedicated to the downfall of consumerism as we know it.

Set in: Modern-day New York

Sopwith rating; 4.5/5
Again, a slight reduction for the ending, which could have been slightly more logical. The romantic element of the story was just a little overbearing as well, but not enough to distract from the story.

So Yesterday
Image links to Amazon
Kindle version: So Yesterday

This was another bargain bin find. (I did warn you that a lot of the books I like come from the bargain bins of secondhand bookstores!) I had heard good things about Scott Westerfeld, the author, though most of the good reviews were for the Uglies series, which I subsequently read and did not like. Ironic, but there you are.

So Yesterday can usually be found in the Young Adult section of bookstores, but don’t let the genre deter you. You can always get some kid to go into the YA section for you, or pretend to buy it “for someone else”…

The seventeen-year-old narrator, Hunter, is insecure in his own skin, though curiously enough he has an occasional job as a “cool-hunter”. As mentioned before, I have a soft spot for the underdogs, the wallflowers, and the socially-awkward, so Hunter is the perfect protagonist to catch my eye.

The plot moves at a breathtaking pace, with tons of cultural references (even though Hunter refuses to name brands, you know who he’s talking about, because he makes it fairly obvious), a great mystery plot/subplot, and many sly digs at “the cool”.

It does slightly annoy me that Hunter does a lot of things he wouldn’t normally do in an attempt to impress his new crush, Jen, because I don’t really like her very much, but maybe that’s just my jealously talking…

I’m studying business in college, so this book is interesting to me on an (very low) academic level, by which I mean I understood more about business and marketing reading this book than I did after three months in class. If you’ve ever wondered how cool “works”, this is definitely the book for you.  

Like this book? Check out other books on my bookshelf

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Maira Gall