Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde

Sometimes you are in the mood for something that is quick and easy and fantasy-esque, and a little bit embarrassing, but fun-times.  Those are the times when you should go read something by Vivian Vande Velde.  The first book of hers I read was--wait for it--Companions of the Night.  Yes, I only read it for its hilariously semi-scandalous title.  Also, vampires.  You know how I roll.  Anyway, the great thing about Vivian's books is that they're just the type of thing to get check out after class on Friday, go home, make some noodles, grab a Citrus Drop, and read cover to cover in like 3 hours.  They're well written enough that you don't have to hate yourself afterwards, but lack any pretensions of being anything beyond what they are, which is popcorn.  

To business.  Heir Apparent...wow, it's really a pretty wacky book.  Let's see if I can sum up.

Okay, so it's a little bit in the future, and the cool thing for all the kids to go is go play virtual reality role-playing games.  So this girl (I forget her name, it's not really important!) gets a gift certificate (it's expensive) and goes to the VR game arcade type place, and decides to do this game called Heir Apparent, in which you're the dead king's long lost daughter (or I guess son, depending) who has to go join the court and do strategic political power play types to avoid being killed long enough to be crowned.  You're allowed like 3 lives or something, in the allotted time of game play.  So she's just hanging out playing it through a couple times, and dying really early on, when all of the sudden there's a glitch.  It turns out a protest group has wreaked some kind of havoc on the VR arcade, and now our young heroine is trapped in the game!  The only way to be extracted from the VR is to win the game, but then the catch is that after a certain period of time her brain will like fry under the pressure or something! Oh no!  Will she be able to solve the intricate puzzle in time?  Let's find out!!

So I guess I was attracted to this in the first place because of the hours of my early life I spent watching Dad play Warcraft and Doom--video games are just fun to watch, when there is no pressure to do anything yourself.  And Vivian (may I call you Vivian, Vivian?) has really great pacing and dramatic timing, and manages to keep everything fresh and interesting and exciting, even when the heroine is on her like 17th try, redoing the same scenario again and again.  And, I don't know, sometimes it seems like fantasy writers have either decided to blow their brains out being as literary and high brow as possible, or they swing to the opposite end and play to the twelve year olds (in a bad way).  Vivian's great because she's just doing her thing, not changing people's lives, and not putting glitter all over the cover (well not much anyway, and that's not really the author's call anyway, is it?), just writing fun popcorn to help us forget our mundane woes.