Is this the real life?

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.

Open your eyes,
Look up to the skies and see,
I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy,
Because I’m easy come, easy go,
Little high, little low,
Anyway the wind blows doesn’t really matter to me, to me.

I’ve had the opening lyrics to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody in my head since I serendipitously  found these two books almost side by side on the “”New books for teens” shelf at the library.

  

Crazy, no?

Both published in Fall 2014.

I am only going to talk about Cory Doctorow’s In Real Life  because Lawrence Tabak’s seems to be a debut novel published within the date ranges of the 2016 Morris award. And, I haven’t read Tabak’s novel yet.

I his In Real Life, Cory Doctorow teams up with graphic artist Jen Wang to create a graphic novel about girl gamers. Besides being a good story, there are lots here about economics and girl gamers. I am not a big graphic novel reader and I am not a gamer, but I found this graphic novel quite interesting and enjoyable.

Goodreads Summary:Anda loves Coarsegold Online, the massively-multiplayer role-playing game where she spends most of her free time. It’s a place where she can be a leader, a fighter, a hero. It’s a place where she can meet people from all over the world, and make friends.

But things become a lot more complicated when Anda befriends a gold farmer–a poor Chinese kid whose avatar in the game illegally collects valuable objects and then sells them to players from developed countries with money to burn. This behavior is strictly against the rules in Coarsegold, but Anda soon comes to realize that questions of right and wrong are a lot less straightforward when a real person’s real livelihood is at stake.