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This brilliantly ironic satire is set in a future world where television  and computers are connected directly into people's brains when they are babies.  The result is a chillingly recognizable consumer society where empty-headed kids  are driven by fashion and shopping and the avid pursuit of silly  entertainment--even on trips to Mars and the moon--and by constant customized  murmurs in their brains of encouragement to buy, buy, buy.Anderson gives us this world through the voice of a boy who, like everyone  around him, is almost completely inarticulate, whose vocabulary, in a dead-on  parody of the worst teenspeak, depends heavily on three words: "like," "thing,"  and the second most common English obscenity. He's even made this vapid kid a  bit sympathetic, as a product of his society who dimly knows something is  missing in his head. The details are bitterly funny--the idiotic but wildly  popular sitcom called "Oh? Wow! Thing!", the girls who have to retire to the  ladies room a couple of times an evening because hairstyles have changed, the  hideous lesions on everyone that are not only accepted, but turned into a  fashion statement. And the ultimate awfulness is that when we finally meet the  boy's parents, they are just as inarticulate and empty-headed as he is, and  their solution to their son's problem is to buy him an expensive car.Although there is a danger that at first teens may see the idea of  brain-computers as cool, ultimately they will recognize this as a fascinating  novel that says something important about their world. (Ages 14 and older)--Patty Campbell