I just finished reading Blue Gold, and it's the first time since becoming a book reviewer that a book has left me speechless and made a deep and lasting impression on me.

The book is very well written, and explores the different lives of 3 girls: Fiona in Canada, living some high school drama and cyber bullying, Laiping in China, working (being exploited) in an electronics manufacturing factory, and Sylvie, living in the middle of the war torn DRC, directly affected by rape, murder and corruption.

The writing is so vivid that you can picture what each of these girls faces on a daily basis. It's shocking, eye-opening and deeply disturbing. Even though this book is fictional, everything could, and does, happen every day.

I found the afterword very important, and am glad the author added it.

The first thing I did after reading the last page was to download the buycott.com app, and then write this review.
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I just finished reading Blue Gold, and it's the first time since becoming a book reviewer that a book has left me speechless and made a deep and lasting impression on me.

The book is very well written, and explores the different lives of 3 girls: Fiona in Canada, living some high school drama and cyber bullying, Laiping in China, working (being exploited) in an electronics manufacturing factory, and Sylvie, living in the middle of the war torn DRC, directly affected by rape, murder and corruption.

The writing is so vivid that you can picture what each of these girls faces on a daily basis. It's shocking, eye-opening and deeply disturbing. Even though this book is fictional, everything could, and does, happen every day.

I found the afterword very important, and am glad the author added it.

The first thing I did after reading the last page was to download the buycott.com app, and then write this review.
( )

I just finished reading Blue Gold, and it's the first time since becoming a book reviewer that a book has left me speechless and made a deep and lasting impression on me.

The book is very well written, and explores the different lives of 3 girls: Fiona in Canada, living some high school drama and cyber bullying, Laiping in China, working (being exploited) in an electronics manufacturing factory, and Sylvie, living in the middle of the war torn DRC, directly affected by rape, murder and corruption.

The writing is so vivid that you can picture what each of these girls faces on a daily basis. It's shocking, eye-opening and deeply disturbing. Even though this book is fictional, everything could, and does, happen every day.

I found the afterword very important, and am glad the author added it.

The first thing I did after reading the last page was to download the buycott.com app, and then write this review.
( )

The human price of digital technology is explored from the perspectives of three teen girls in this novel set in the present. Fiona, a middle-class Canadian makes an impulsive decision that haunts her virtually, and she learns a big lesson in digital responsibility. Sylvie is a Congolese refugee living in Tanzania. Her father was killed and she raped and disfigured by soldiers fighting over Coltan, a mineral used in technology that powers cell phones and computers. Laiping works in a factory assembling cell phones, enduring slave-like conditions that cause her fellow employees to develop serious medical problems and some to commit suicide. Though the problems of the three girls are resolved too neatly, Stewart offers readers a character-driven, absorbing narrative artfully blending insights into global politics and business ethics, and reveals the interconnectedness of the global economy. ( )

2-1/2

Warning. This book addresses topics that are heavy and graphic, including violence, rape and sweatshops, and is not appropriate for younger readers.

While I read this book in a fairly short period of time, I still had some problems with this one.

To be honest, some of my issues with it may not matter to anyone else. I struggled with the different point of views, and felt that the stories came together entirely too briefly, especially since the summary mentioned about the stories coming together. Yet, in the text of the book, this happened in the last dozen pages or so. When it is mentioned as prominent enough to be part of the summary, you would think it would play a larger role in the story.

Laiping, Fiona, and Sylvie all have interesting stories on their own, but when you put the stories side by side you see how one thing can have an effect on many, many people. Even when things go horribly in your life, those horrible things spread out like ripples in a pond.

The difficult topics were handled fairly tastefully, although the incident with Fiona, I think, was handled a little too casually for me to be comfortable.

These were heavy topics that really needed to be out there, I just wish that the way the three story lines came together would have been handled a little better. ( )