Heir Apparent ***

Vande Velde, Vivian. Heir Apparent. New York: Harcourt, 2002.

Giannine receives a gift certificate from her father to a virtual reality role playing game establishment. When she arrives, there are protestors there who are against children being exposed to "fantasy". She decides to play a game where she finds out she is really the daughter of the King and has been named his successor. She has to go to the castle and successfully become King and run the Kingdom. Once she gets into her game, the protestors break into the establishment and do damage.

The owner comes over the speaker and tells her what has happened. She can not be disconnected because getting disconnected in the middle will cause her brain damage. Her only way out is to solve the problem successfully. He gives her some hints as to how to finish successfully, but she is mostly on her own to figure out how to sucessfully finish the game before she stays in too long and damages herself. It looks as if she will never be successful because it takes her over half the book to get past the first day.

This isn't really my genre. It was very well written but I felt is was tedious because she was dying and having to go back to the beginning so much. Even though she changed some things along the way, I still felt like it was repeating a lot which I didn't like. After I was half way through, I was totally bored and just skimmed to get the gist of the story.