You’ve probably heard of Neal Shusterman, since he’s a pretty prolific and popular YA author. Neal published a couple books with his son, Jarrod, and now Jarrod is striking out in the writing world with his wife, Sofia Lapuente.

They reached out to me about their YA novel, Retro, [buy Bookshop Amazon] and once they said “thriller” and “Riverdale vibes”, I was in.

Retro tells Luna’s story, as she gets caught up in some not-so-great moments. She gets busted for shoplifting, but it was really her friend, who doesn’t take responsibility. Luna is upset about it and posts a less-than-flattering video of the friend onto social media. The video spreads like wildfire and leads to an intense bullying situation.

The bullying is so bad, the social media company steps in with a challenge: go a year without technology newer than the turn of the century and win a college scholarship. Luna commits to the challenge as a way to atone for what she’s done and makes new friends along the way, but they stumble into something bigger. Something that raises a lot more questions.

There are a lot of interesting questions raised by this book overall, including about bullying and social media. This book would be a great way for parents to read with teens in order to ease into conversations about those important topics.

As to the writing, Retro is definitely created with teens in mind. Many chapters end with lines that we’ll call ‘clickbait-y’ for lack of a better word. Things along the lines of ‘you won’t believe what happens next’. For me, it was eyeroll-inducing, but I could see a teenager eating it up, so it serves it’s purpose to keep them reading.

I did love how much of herself Sofia put into this story. Luna is Spanish, and Sofia herself is an immigrant from Spain. It was nice to see those personal touches throughout the story that you just know came from her experience.

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