After reading a lot of heavy books, it’s sometimes nice to pick something quick and easy up. Young adult fiction is often like this for me, but I’ve also found that it’s sometimes better than its adult-targeting peers. There’s a lot of good YA fiction out there, but it’s often dismissed because it’s written for a younger audience.
That, unfortunately, isn’t the case with Tag, You’re Dead by Kathryn Foxfield. It’s a book that caught my attention with its title and its premise, but failed to hook me and left me glad to be finished it.
Tag, You’re Dead is set in London, England, where a young millionaire decides to create a large scale game of tag. One in which the winner will be given 100,000 pounds, and all contestants will have to wear both chip-driven bracelets and AR glasses. Anton has designed his real life game of tag using tools from his augmented reality games, including ghosts that only appear when the glasses are on, and videos that play through the lenses. He just hasn’t been careful enough to protect it all.
Shortly after the game begins, someone hacks into it and changes it. They appear as a young woman named Rose, who died while attending one of Anton’s parties. It was deemed an accident, but was it? According to the hacker, it was murder, and she’s not afraid to unveil several suspects and bring them to all players’ attention. Then, people start to die during the game, and nobody knows why, or who’s at fault for these new killings.
This book is told from three different perspectives, including that of Rose’s ex-boyfriend, Grayson, who wants nothing more than to have her back. His first-person perspective is joined by those of an Anton-loving fangirl named Charlotte, and a beautiful video blogger named Erin, whose mother controls her life as if it’s nothing but a brand. They’re all entrants in the tag competition, and all have ties to Rose. For instance, Charlotte wrote fanfiction stories in which she dated Anton, as well as comments about how Rose was an awful person and how she wished her poor luck.
Some of Charlotte’s fantasies appear in the book, and they just randomly do so. You’ll be reading something, and then it’ll go on an odd tangent without notice, making you wonder if it’s real or not. This is one issue with this book and its writing, which leaves something to be desired but is serviceable overall. The other is that all three viewpoints are so similar, that I sometimes had to go back and check to see whose chapter I was reading at the time. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple points of view, but they need to be different. Unless the characters were opining about their individual problems, they all read the same way.
I was hoping that Kathryn Foxfield’s Tag, You’re Dead would be a good, intense YA read. However, it failed to hook me and was something I read quickly because I wanted to get it done. I took the book with me to a concert, and read on the train there and back, as well as at the concert while I was waiting for it to start.
In all honesty, this is one of the worst books I’ve read this year. That’s not to say it’s shockingly awful, or pure garbage. There’s just nothing about it that I really liked. It was hard to follow at times, due to the similar language across all three viewpoints, and was sometimes all over the place. I don’t think it’s a good book, and found it lacking.
I feel bad giving the book a negative review, because the author obviously put a lot of work into writing it, but it just wasn’t something I particularly enjoyed.
This review is based on a copy of the book that we were provided. An advanced reader’s copy.