Exploring the Book "Nerve": a Review of Thriller Novel

In the book Nerve, by Jeanne Ryan, we are quickly introduced to our main character Vee. Vee is a behind the scene kind of person, metaphorically and realistically. Her and her best friends Sydney and Tommy spend most of their time preparing for a play. Sydney works on stage in front of the audience but Vee prefers to be backstage doing makeup and costumes, to avoid an audience for she is very timid and shy. Vee is a small blonde girl. She is extremely shy around people except for her best friend Sydney. But because Sydney naturally attracts a crowd Vee is sometimes forced to hang out with some of Sydney’s friends as well. She sometimes tries stepping out of her comfort zone and try things that she normally wouldn’t, and usually those are the things that get her in trouble or in really bad situations. One day as she was leaving rehearsal, a guy that she has been crushing on walks up to her. They start talking while they were walking home and Vee gets a notification on her phone. She takes a glance at it and reads it out loud. It was an ad for a dare app that gives you prices once you complete the dare. The instructions are firmly given. First dare you can pick, every other one is given. You keep playing until you go to the final rounds without giving up or losing your dare. If you bail on your dare or fail at doing it then Nerve takes you out of the competition and takes away all of your prizes. The guy walking with her took a look at her phone and said “you’re not actually thinking about doing it are you?” Vee starts getting annoyed at the amount of people who don’t think she can do stuff because of how quiet and shy she is. Although she was thinking about signing up, she turns and says, “of course not, just wanted to check it out.” When she gets home later that night she takes out her phone and watches previous dares people have done to see what the big deal was. Vee didn’t see anything bad about being paired up with someone to complete a simple dare and winning a prize. So she signed up willingly not knowing that one dare was only going to lead to another and each dare kept getting harder and more riskey.

Some of my favorite lines from the book is in the beginning of chapter ten, “‘where do you want to visit so bad?’ He swallows. ‘It’s about the ability to leave. The freedom.’ ‘what do they want you to do for the car? Bungee jump without a cord?’” This is one of my favorite lines because I love the way this couple is able to be sarcastic together without having any problems afterwards. I also like it because it made me laugh the first time I read it. My other favorite line is at the beginning of chapter six where it says, “I click the link that shows the next prize- a premium phone loaded with all of the apps I could want plus a high-def camera, lightning fast internet access, and two years of unlimited service. Wow.” I really like this line because it shows how easy to convince Vee is with the dares regardless of how dangerous they can be or what she has to risk. And it also shows what kind of prizes hooks onto Vee to convince her to change her answer to an easy ‘yes’. What I learned from this book is that I should never do anything that could put me in danger for the entertainment of those around me. I also learned that going against the law and putting myself out there as bait to win great big prizes is really kind of dumb and pathetic. I also noticed that the main character Vee also learned this lesson after Nerve took this game way too far in the final rounds and left her and a group of kids to face a life or death situation with only a few to survive. Luckily she came up with the plan to escape before anyone got hurt.

I really enjoyed reading this book because as soon as I started reading it, I got hooked onto it because it was a very entertaining story and I wanted to find out how far the game would take it and if the players would really do what it takes to finish the game. I also liked it cause it was a very exciting thing to read because one chapter after another you keep wondering ‘what will happen next’ or ‘what choice is she going to take. I would 100% 10/10 recommend everyone and anyone to read this book.