Book Summary: Gamer Girl- GG

Gamer Girl: by Mari Mancusi

This book is about Maddy, who moves from Boston Academy in the city to Hannah Dustin High, which is in a small town called Farmingdale. Maddy hates it, and what’s worse is that she’s living with her unicorn-loving grandma. She can’t move back to Boston, no matter what happens, because her mom can’t afford to pay the tuition for her old school after the big divorce. Her first day at the new school is a huge flop; she is forced to wear a unicorn sweatshirt and her grandma drives her to school, embarrassing her in front of everyone, including the Haters, a group of the most popular kids in the school. This is my second or third time reading this, and each time I feel really bad for her. But on Maddy’s birthday, her dad gets her Fields of Fantasy, an online game where you can be whatever you want! Everyday, after school, Maddy logs in and plays as Allora, a beautiful blond-haired elf magician who is the exact opposite of her irl (in real life.) She meets Sir Leo, a brave and gallant elf knight, and they adventure together for a while. Meanwhile, in school, Chad (one of the Haters and Maddy’s crush) gives her a flyer for a manga contest. Maddy is a great artist, and enters the contest with Gamer Girl, her manga that is based on her adventures with Sir Leo. She starts a manga club, too, where she figures out that her friend Matt is Sir Leo. She confronts him about it, but he denies everything and tells her that the facts she learned about Sir Leo point directly to Chad! But Maddy’s heartbroken when she tells Sir Leo that she knows who he is-he laughs and calls her Freak Girl, the Haters’ nickname for her in school. To make matters worse, she’d left her manga in the library, and Billy (another one of the Haters) got the others to hang them up around the school, with mustaches and devil horns all over Allora and Sir Leo. She enters the contest anyway, with what she can recreate, but when she’s waiting in line to be judged Chad comes- along with her manga club and a whole bunch of fans that came to support her! He explains to her that Billy had been at his house, and started messing around with the game. It was Billy who wrote those things, not him. He’d blackmailed the other Haters into giving him the drawings that hadn’t been ruined, and the manga club worked together to redo the other scenes. Gamer Girl won the contest, and the judges (including Svetlana, Maddy’s hero) agreed that the collaborative style of the manga made it number one.