Very pleased with this review on http://www.darkmatterzine.com/

A review by Nalini Haynes.

Dan Langley is your typical 16-year-old geek except for his affinity with code. He goes down the rabbit hole to get an adrenaline rush from hacking, escalating his exploits on a dare from Angel, another hacker he only met online. Before he knows it, Dan has hacked the US military network and might be complicit in the theft of a strike drone.

From script kiddies to the dark net, Counter Strike to Starcraft II, Tracy Alexander knows her stuff. Like in other hacking movies (Wargames, Hackers) the mechanics of hacking is glossed over. The current era of wikileaks and US extradition with threats of Guatanamo Bay-style treatment of prisoners is prevalent with mentions of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange among others.

Hacked should be compulsory reading for all teenage computer geeks, many adult computer geeks and all parents of teenage geeks. Because one book speaking the language trumps lectures from a “dinosaur” every time. When my son was at school, script kiddies regularly dumped the school printers’ ink, which was hilarious until you need to print an assignment and all of the printers are out of ink. [My son knew if he was one of those script kiddies and he was caught, he was banned from the computer for the rest of high school. >:-]

I’m giving Hacked five stars for voice, plot, pacing, relevance and currency. Read it. Pass it on. Make sure it’s in all the libraries in all the schools. Kgo.