Be More Chill: Swap the **** in your hand for a squip in your head

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One thing that i really like about this book is that it has everything a teenager wants to read about. Well maybe this is true for all the boys. Girls can read it only if they don't get grossed out by the male sexual details inside. But still, who couldn't relate to Jeremy? Almost every high schooler has at least one crush and needs to find a way to get to their crush. They rely on advice. Who would have though that it would be a supercomputer that gives you all the advice you need? How unique is that? It is true, the computer does tell you everything you need. All Jeremy wants is to be Cool. He wants to rub shoulders with the Hottest Girls in School. But most of all, he wants the attention of Christine, a girl in his drama club who won his heart over.

There is also some lesson that the Squip gives him, instructing him that women and girls are attracted to pheromones. Once you get with a girl, other girls will come to you and want you. -- Again, this is terribly problematic, because it states that every girl will want to have sexual advances made towards her because of the boy's prolific history. Then the Squip gives this comment, "HOW DO YOU THINK GUYS WITH GIRLFRIENDS BECOME SO ATTRACTIVE TO OUTSIDE FEMALES THAT THEY'RE FORCED TO CHEAT WITH?" (155). Now, this is suggesting that there is justification in infidelity on the male's part because of females' "innate" attraction.

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Why is Jeremy so mean to Michael? And why did Michael just accept all of Jeremy’s crap? At some point Jeremy should have realised that the Squip is just a piece of technology and Michael has been his best friend for many years and treating him like dirt is just going to make him leave. Of course, it’s all explained that Michael realised what was going on, and there were no hard feelings, but that just takes the onus off of Jeremy completely. Jeremy wasn’t a bystander, he chose to do what the Squip told him, but the book ends up treating him like he was a bystander. End verdict: I think I (kind of) enjoyed this book because I love the musical. Had it not been for the musical, I probably would not have finished, let alone enjoyed, the book. Be More Chill was a fun, poignant read, although it was shorter than I would've liked. (How often do you say that about books?) I'm guessing the actual novel developed the characters and the situations more, but I enjoyed this tremendously. I definitely found myself wondering what parts might have led into a song in the musical adaptation.

You might have been thinking - wait, wait, as YAF shouldn’t this book have ended with the boy realizing he’s better off as himself, without the aid of a microcomputer telling him exactly what to say? No. No, that’s not the moral: the moral is wait to buy yourself the exact piece of technology that will make imperfect-you more perfect so that you might have money, friends, and sex. The Broadway musical Be More Chill was based on a YA novel of the same name by the late Ned Vizzini. They bring distinctive singing voices to their parts, particularly Michael and Jeremy. Some songs work better than others and the best of Joe Iconis’s lyrics contain fantastically funny lines alongside bathos. The score has a deliberately dissonant sound – with edges of emo and rap – that conveys a high-pitched teen angst, while Alex Basco Koch’s graphic projections distort or light up garishly to mirror Jeremy’s altered mind states. A deeper strain of suicidal darkness flows beneath the colour and comedy. High-school kids wish themselves dead or to have never been born. This theme chimes with the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, and Vizzini’s own suicide in 2013 gives it added poignancy. In his lifetime, Vizzini was thanked by young readers who felt helped by his work, and to watch Be More Chill is to glimpse an authentic portrait of the soaring joys and plunging agonies of adolescence. From what I can glean from my first listen of the album, the plot of the musical was tweaked in several ways. I'm going to read the CD booklet to find out exactly what I've not been hearing. Regardless, some of the songs are catchy, and I can always fix them when I sing along in the future.The ends of both pieces are so different you'd think that the writers of the musical didn't finish reading the book and just decided to make their own ending. The ending of the musical is a lot better, though. The squip is actually seen as evil in the musical, as it should be. In the book, the squip is just like "Hey, if you want to get rid of me, no biggie. Drink some Mountain Dew: Code Red™" and everyone is happy to pretend there was no harm done. In the musical, Jeremy tries with everything he has to shut it off because it's, you know, evil. However, the musical has the same problem of Hey! Squip's gone! Now I don't have to deal with any consequences!! Some guys are bullies, others are just there, like Jake, to add conflict and make himself harmless when the plot demands it.