Review: CLICK'D by Tamara Ireland Stone

CLICK'D by Tamara Ireland Stone
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  This book will be available on September 5th for purchase.

I read this book in a day, that should tell you something. I really loved the messages this book conveyed about empowering young girls to code and participate in technology disciplines. As someone who studied engineering and who was one of 13 girls out of 80 in my Electrical Engineering major in college that really spoke to me. I've spent most of my professional career involved in software development so I really enjoyed seeing a young girl so inspired to do good with her code.

My only real issue with the book was that a middle school teen had access to all of this personal identifiable information, which is a cyber security risk that she could do anything with or some cyber criminal could do something with but her mentor and teacher never said anything about it. I think the author did an OK job addressing that issue, but I think I because of my experience in the technology risk area I'm being a little over critical.  I just wish her mentor would have had her mask the data or said something about it since she was always in the database looking at it.  Again, probably too much for a middle grade reader, but its what I do all day and having access to all of her user's phone numbers and account information is something a 7th grader really shouldn't have access to.  Knowing their favorite color and what kind of pizza they like is fine, but the other stuff is probably is too much info in my opinion, again probably too critical and technical based on my profession.  

Overall I really enjoyed the story. I couldn't put it down. I really loved Ally. I connected with her as a girl who liked "nerdy" stuff and who played soccer. I saw so much of myself in her. The story is about Ally and the "game" she created at CodeGirls, a coding camp for girls over the summer. The purpose of her game Click'd is to find new friends based on a series of questions in a quiz you answer, much like an online dating profile. She even goes so far as to say that she studies those types of apps to create her own to make sure her data was matching people based on their likes and dislikes. She wanted people to make new friends or atleast talk to people that they otherwise would have never found before. She soon comes to find out that one of her best friends in real life is upset because her in real life friends are no longer on the top if her leaderboard and that isn't fun for her. Ally also finds a major bug in her app and tries to fix it on her own without help from her computer teacher and mentor for the Games for Good competition she's hoping to win. She finds an unlikely ally in her long time nemesis Nathan, who like Ally is also entered in the competition. Ally just wants people to find and click with people they otherwise wouldn't have ever talked to before, bringing smiles to peoples faces as they spark new friendships. Her app causes alot of turmoil and Ally isn't sure she can fix it.

I think this story has a lot of great messages about friendship and loyalty, being driven to succeed, learning from your mistakes, and how technology especially mobile technology has really changed how we interact as a society. I really liked how in the end Ally's game brought people together the way she'd hoped and that she learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way. I would highly recommend this for the middle grade crowd, especially girls interested in the technology fields.