When you realize who the villain is, the whole plan to ruin Janus's personal life is really silly and counterproductive. However the plot is written quite well, there's a bit of romance and lot's of adventure. A fun read. ( )

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Janus Rose is a brilliant computer wizard. She and her mom run Assured Destruction, a computer recycling business. What her mother doesn’t know is that she’s taken hard drives of some of her friends recycled computers and created her very own network called Shadownet. Suddenly, her real friends begin getting attacked online with information that could only be found on the computers sent in to be recycled. Janus stops at nothing to find out who is behind it, save the business, and clear her name.

This was a fun read for me, probably because I’m a computer geek as well. Janus’ loneliness led her to do something risky yet very cool. I loved had she was written as a smart, strong, and very stubborn female character. There was lots of action, and the ending was quite a surprise. This was a fantastic mystery and I can’t wait to see what Mr. Stewart has for us next!
( )

Assured Destruction is a very modern, tech- and social media-filled mystery for young adults. (The cover may appear a bit Minority Report-esque, but it's not science fiction -- everything in the book is possible with today's technology.) I enjoyed reading it now, and it definitely would have been up my alley as a teen.

However, since I did read it as an adult, I spent most of the book wanting to smack Janus for her lack of common sense. Her actions throughout the book aren't just unwise, they're often illegal, too: hacking, plagiarism, identity theft (stealing someone's image/name/personality is as much identity theft as stealing their financial information), truancy, breaking & entering, destruction of property, rifling through other people's mail, viewing child pornography (even if it was in an attempt to track down the distributor), cyberbullying, dissemination of computer viruses... The originating crime is the pocketing of hard drives for personal use instead of destroying them; that would probably classify as something along the lines of theft or failure to fulfill contractual obligations. I do think part of the point of the book was to get teens to realize how wrong and how dangerous these actions can be, even if they seem like the kinds of things that won't hurt anyone. I don't feel Janus fully felt the consequences and ramifications of her actions, though. While she definitely suffered injury, and she was brought before a court, her relatively minor sentence of 2,000 hours of community service is outweighed by the compliments, praise, and grudging admiration she receives from both her peers and people of authority (judge, police, parent, school) for what she accomplished.

Finally, the text seemed to need another pass by an editor -- there were minor typos; sentences with periods where there probably should have been commas, semi-colons, or dashes; and a few sentences that were confusing. Overall, though, the book was well-written and definitely good value for the price (currently free). ( )

This review can also be found on my blog Love at First Write

A copy of this book was given to me by the author to read for an honest review.
 
Janus is your typically teen going through High School, aside from the fact that her father walked out on her and her mother and Janus doesn't know why, her mom is now in a wheel chair, their shop is close to shutting down, and to top it all off Janus is an unappreciated computer genius. No exactly typical.
 
So, Janus and her mom run 'Assured Destruction' where they assure the destruction of hard drives for people. Except, not all of them meet the mouth of Chop-chop. Janus has a place called The Shadownet. She goes through hard drives and pieces together a persona from the information on it. She then puts these people on the Internet. They're like a family to her, their infractions are each a different part of her. JanusFlyTrap, Gumps, Heekleena, Frannie, and the new recruit Paradise57. Things were great, her biggest problem was Chippy the computer science teacher who she had a mutual dislike for. That all changed when the hacker attacked. Her Online refuge is getting destroyed piece by piece, and she is getting pushed into a world of reality and relationships with real people.
 
Not only is this way more serious than she ever imagined, her mother is also starting to date a new guy named Peter and now that she notices, Janus is having some boy trouble of her own.
 
I love the tension between Janus and her mother throughout the book. It completely realistic and reminds me of an over-the-top exaggeration on my own relationship with my mom (we don't agree on things very often). The way technology is incorporated into the story was great. I mean, I wasn't expecting much (the whole e-book thing is still skeptical to me haha) but this book actually blew me away. I genuinely loved the modern writingI style and how the book didn't end in a 'happily ever after' sort of way, but it was still satisfying. I totally wasn't expecting the plot twists, I ended up feeling emotions for the characters instead of just 'reading from the sidelines' and I couldn't help but root for Jonny's success as far as relationships go hehe. There WAS a bit of a love triangle, but the fact that the book wasn't revolved around it at all was awesome. I thought is was really cool that Jonny spray paints and is artistic, while the book also brought up real world issues about the modern high the world such as bullying on social media, how easily pictures spread, hackers, identity theft, child pornography etc. it was really quite interesting. The book is told in a very new generation social media sort of fun lingo with the occasion tweets from her different selves. It was really enjoyable to read :D ( )

Different, but interesting. ( )