The Aftermath

“I am something else. Something called a character. A human trapped inside an intentional hell.” Claudia Virtue is living every gamer’s scariest fantasy—she’s a sentient puppet in a live-action, first-person shooter game. Her gamer is a girl named Olivia, capable of playing Claudia for 48 hours straight. Claudia believes a head injury jarred her into awareness, and the blow was struck by Declan, a boy who calls himself a “moderator.” Like Claudia, he’s sentient within the game; unlike Claudia, he knows how to get out. Alexander makes even the mundane acts of eating and resting into wellsprings of tension as Claudia, with no memory and only intermittent autonomy, struggles to piece together her situation and find a way out. The plotting only takes her so far—this is very much a “book one,” with no closure in sight by the final page, with more presumably to come in future installments. Despite the cliffhanger, Alexander has written an impressively jumpy, obsessive homage to the games she loves. Ages 14–up. Agent: Mollie Glick, Foundry Literary + Media. (Sept.)