Adam Cadre

I first heard about author Adam Cadre through his work in interactive fiction computer games (like Zork), and I was so impressed with the creativity of his own text adventures that when I heard he had a novel published, I immediately grabbed a copy. I was not disappointed.

The narrator of Ready, Okay! is Allen Mockery, an extremely gifted teenager from a family of extremely gifted children, who lets the reader know up front that he is documenting the months leading up to a disaster that will claim many lives. Published shortly after the Columbine massacre, it doesn't take Long to figure out what's coming, but that doesn't take away from the novel's guided tour through the trials and tribulations of a high school student's life, and the humorous - yet touching - struggles involved in these tumultuous time of life for those who are unavoidably "different" like Allen and his brothers and sisters.

For those looking for a more serious examination of the causes behind school shootings such as Columbine, I would recommend looking elsewhere, such as Jim Shepard's Project X. Not because Cadre's novel does not take these events seriously, but only because some of the fantastic characters and events within the novel are separated enough from reality so that the Columbine aspects are more a part of the story than the reason or overall message. The scope of Cadre's novel is a bit larger than that, and so the reader should definitely expect more.

There are some that might consider Ready, Okay! a young adult novel, but even though the main characters are teens, I get the feeling that Cadre did not write this just for a teen audience, but rather for anyone who will listen, because he really does have something to say that's worth listening to, or at least reading.… (mere)

The very first sentence of this book tells you that it's not going to end happily. Lots of people are going to die. Within the first couple chapters you realize that they're going to die in a shooting, probably reminiscent of Columbine. And you are not mistaken. Don't get me wrong - this book is very funny. The characters are memorable, unique, and yet stunningly familiar to anyone who went to high school in the last decade (and perhaps longer; I don't know what high school was like before the early 1990s). Granted, my high school years were notably lacking in the sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence departments, but adolescents are still adolescents regardless of whether they're being self-destructive. The narrator's commentary on child and teenage communication is hilariously accurate, and I felt myself nodding along with a lot of the inanity.However, during the last hundred pages or so it starts to drag a bit. Tragedy after tragedy strikes, people start acting very much unlike teenagers (or real people at all), and there is a lengthy and rather disturbing discussion of nudism and incest. It's one of those books that I'm glad I read, but I'm also not surprised it wasn't what you might call critically acclaimed. Ultimately I think I would recommend this book to teenagers. It's most relevant to their lives; the rest of us are lucky enough to have lived through it already.… (mere)