Viral

Author/Guide: Helen FitzGerald

Why a Booktrail?

2000s With one of the most shocking and seedy first lines we’ve ever read this is a cautionary tale of life in the internet age.

ISBN: 978-0571323517
Genre: Psychological, Thriller

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What you need to know before your trail

The trouble with being young nowadays is that everything that happens on holiday doesn’t stay on holiday. But it does stay online….

Su and her sister Leah go on holiday to Magaluf and come back with more than memories. Someone has filmed what Su got up to in a club and it’s gone viral. Her family and everyone she knows has seen the film. Su is trapped in an online nightmare, a viral nightmare that just keeps spreading…

Just what do young girls get up to in the bars and drinking dens of Magaluf nowadays and more to the point – young men. The world of the teenager is lived and breathed on line nowadays and it would seem that there is no escape.

How do you deal with something when it goes viral?

Locations

Reset

South Korea
C: Seoul - Myeondong

Scotland
D: Glasgow - Oliphant family home

Travel Guide

No locations from the booktrail point of view really as when you’ve read this you probably will think twice about going to Magaluf and if you are older than the average person that goes there you probably won’t want to go anyway. But to be fair this could happen in reality anywhere.

The dark side of young people on holiday in Magaluf (or any such resort renowned for drunken antics)

Having said that, it’s not a tale about Magaluf, it’s the story of the internet and how people deal with what they do when everything is on line now and stays on line for ever. It’s the fallout from this and what happens when a girl does something that is recorded and so everyone gets to see it – her family and friends and the other 23 000 people or so who have logged on to look.

The Magaluf incident may be just the launch pad for a journey into the dark side of the internet. The way in which a family responds and reacts to the viral video and the fallout from it is a dark study of human relationships and dealing with consequences and difficulties of growing up.