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Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Paige Not Found

Wilde, Jen. Paige Not Found
April 16, 2024 by Scholastic Press
E ARC provided by Edelweiss Plus

Paige loves to play Realm of Wonders with her best friend Mara, but when her mother catches her playing late at night after her mother gets home from a shift at the hospital, she takes away all of Paige's technology. This is a problem, because Paige has seen a worrisome e mail on her father's computer. Her father is getting reports on her brain activity as well as everything else she is doing, and with Mara's help, she finds out that instead of having her tonsils removed when she was young, her parents had a Dot from Nucleus Nanotech installed in her brain! The tech company is run by Elliot Preston, a tech innovator who also dabbles in space flight. Just when she's starting to wrap her mind around what her parents have done to her, and what they think of her autism, she finds that the company has merged with a social media platform, Homepage, that has a history of selling user data. Will her brain be for sale? The Dot is suppose to her with her autism, delivering serotonin if she is stressed, and monitoring her condition, supposedly helping prevent meltdowns as well. Paige thought her parents understood her, but do they really think she is "broken"? Paige and Mara manage to find other children who have the device, including Kelsey, whose mother is a popular "autism mom" social media presence, Marcus, who is very young and nonverbal but has an older sister, Gabby who is worried about the technology, and Maxwell, an older teen who agreed to the technology and doesn't want to try to attack the company. There are other things going on in Paige's life as well; she comes out to her parents as gay, and is upset when Mara and Kelsey start to be friends. Paige is determined to get to Nucleus' headquarters, however, and manages to get there with Gabby's help when she runs away from a class trip to a museum. The children manage to sneak into the lab undetected and make it to Preston's office to snoop around, when they are caught by Dr. Lisa. Dr. Lisa is upset over the merger of companys, and what that might mean for individual data, and also over the treatment of lab animals and of the children who have the Dot. She agrees to help erase data from Preston's computer. Will Paige and the others who have this intrusive technology be able to go back to their lives unmonitored?
Strengths: This had strong messages about autism acceptance and LGBTQIA+ acceptance; Paige doesn't really want her brain to be changed, and her parents are very supportive when she tells them that she might be like her favorite teacher, Ms. Penny, and her wife, Amy. 
Weaknesses: It seemed unlikely that a group of children would be able to sneak into Preston's office without detection. I can suspend disbelief about technology in the brain, but not about that, so maybe younger readers won't have the same problem. 
What I really think: This is a good choice for readers who enjoyed Kuyatt's autism positive Good Different, Lucas' Let the Monster Out, or Lerangis' Max Tilt series and uses teachnology in the same way that Park's Averill Offline does. (See review 26 Feburary 2024). 

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