Boy in a White Room

by Karl Olsberg

Overview

A gripping YA sci-fi thriller by German and Spiegel-bestselling author, Karl Olsberg. The Boy in a White Room was nominated for Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis 2018, Germany’s most prestigious youth fiction award.

A fifteen-year-old boy wakes to find himself locked in a white, cube-shaped room. No windows. No doors. Total silence. He has no memories. No clue how he got there. No idea who he is.

A computer-generated voice named Alice responds to his questions. Through her, he is able to access the internet. As the boy uncovers snippets of his story—an attempted abduction, a critial injury, a murder — it becomes clearer. But when some of the pieces don't fit, how can he tell what's real and what's not? Who can he trust? And who is he really?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781338831849
Publisher:	Scholastic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/07/2023
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	616,059
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	HL660L (what's this?)
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

Karl Olsberg wrote his Ph.D. thesis on artificial intelligence. He worked as amanagement consultant, marketing manager, and game developer, and founded three award-winning start-up companies. His first novel, Das System, was published in 2007 and became an international bestseller, nominated for the Kurd-Lasswitz-Award as best German science fiction novel. Since then, he has published more than 20 books. Among them are the bestselling series Cubeworld and The Villagers, based on the computer game Minecraft, which he loves to play together with his three sons.

Editorial Reviews

01/09/2023

An initially unnamed teenager wakes up alone in a blank white room with no recollection of who he is or how he came to be there in this cerebral speculative thriller by Olsberg. The teen’s only apparent companion is a virtual assistant named Alice, whose monotone voice “seems to come from everywhere.” With Alice’s help, the teen uses the internet to try and piece together what has happened to him. After some time, a new voice claiming to be his father informs him that he is a 15-year-old Hamburg resident named Manuel, who suffered life-threatening injuries following a failed abduction by unknown assailants that resulted in his mother’s death. Assuming that he will have to “live in this virtual reality world forever,” Manuel endeavors to uncover more about his past, in the process unearthing ominous truths regarding his father’s claims and the world beyond the white room. While the conclusion’s breakneck pace leaves a number of questions unanswered, Olsberg makes adventurous use of classic sci-fi tropes, meticulously arranging them in a continually surprising series of twists and turnabouts to craft a pensive tale that explores questions of artificial intelligence, free will, and personhood. Ages 12–up. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Olsberg makes adventurous use of classic sci-fi tropes, meticulously arranging them in a continually surprising series of twists and turnabouts to craft a pensive tale that explores questions of artificial intelligence, free will, and personhood." — Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2022-12-14
A science-fiction thriller translated from German about a boy trapped in a virtual world.

The teen wakes up locked in a silent, white, square room, devoid of memories. He can’t smell anything, has no sense of touch, and when he tries to speak, his robotic voice sounds computer-generated. He eventually learns from a man who introduces himself as his father that he is a 15-year-old named Manuel, lives in Hamburg, and is the survivor of a kidnapping attempt during which his mother was killed and he was left for dead, his body damaged beyond repair. Through new technology, his father was able to rescue his brain, and, after a series of operations, Manuel is now able to survive a primarily virtual existence in a simulation of Middle-earth created especially for him due to his love of Tolkien’s books. But the more Manuel interacts with the outside world through the internet (with the help of Alice, his voice-activated virtual assistant), the more he comes to question whether he is being told the truth about what happened and who he really is. Carefully crafted, thought-provoking questions about identity, self, and humanity are interwoven with heavy-handed elements pulled from The Lord of the Rings and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to tell a punchy, fast-paced story that doesn’t quite coalesce into a convincing, cohesive whole in its rushed ending. The largely racially ambiguous characters are minimally described.

An intriguing if uneven journey of self-discovery. (Science fiction. 13-18)

Kirkus Reviews