Ready, Okay!

by Adam Cadre

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An unforgettable debut novel about the lives of a group of alienated teenagers in suburban California that Introduces a startling new voice in fiction. Meet Allen Mockery: "The day I turned sixteen years old I had no idea that in four months nearly everyone I cared about would be dead. Unburdened by this foreknowledge, it was with a free and unclouded spirit that I went down to the DMV and failed my driving test." So begins Adam Cadre's captivating, darkly comic story of teenage life in America in the new millennium, fold through the lives of Allen and a parade of friends and foes, each more vivid and memorable than the last: Peggy: "You can hit it off with all kinds of people, but once you've shared a counterespionage run with someone, well, that's the kind of bond that goes deeper than sharing your math notes." Siren: "They asked us what our career plans were and Siren said she was going to be a Laker Girl. Then we fed these milelong Scantrons into a computer and it said that the career that she was actually best suited for was Laker Girl." Echo: "Her eyes could bore a hole in you the size of a chicken pot pie and she always dressed entirely in black, which is pretty lame but certainly impresses the hell out of most fifteen-year-olds." Molly: "She had her own heater to make sure her room stayed a toasty eighty-four degrees. This probably would've been uncomfortably hot if not for the fact that Molly refused to wear any clothing whatsoever." These are just a few of the people you'll meet watching Allen and friends fry to shepherd one another through a minefield of violence, drugs, and parental abandonment as their story careens to its gripping ending. Adam Cadre has created a heartfelt, original novel that offers a new way of looking at the perennial struggles of teenagers. Ready, Okay! is just the right novel at the right time powerful and entertaining story that an entire generation of readers can embrace and call its own.… (more)

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Abandoned half way through. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I found Cadre's tone here really grating—everything sounds like someone writing a book, no one sounds like a real person. Bummer.

mrgan | Oct 30, 2017 |

I first heard about author Adam Cadre through his work in interactive fiction computer games (like Zork), and I was so impressed with the creativity of his own text adventures that when I heard he had a novel published, I immediately grabbed a copy. I was not disappointed.

The narrator of Ready, Okay! is Allen Mockery, an extremely gifted teenager from a family of extremely gifted children, who lets the reader know up front that he is documenting the months leading up to a disaster that will claim many lives. Published shortly after the Columbine massacre, it doesn't take Long to figure out what's coming, but that doesn't take away from the novel's guided tour through the trials and tribulations of a high school student's life, and the humorous - yet touching - struggles involved in these tumultuous time of life for those who are unavoidably "different" like Allen and his brothers and sisters.

For those looking for a more serious examination of the causes behind school shootings such as Columbine, I would recommend looking elsewhere, such as Jim Shepard's Project X. Not because Cadre's novel does not take these events seriously, but only because some of the fantastic characters and events within the novel are separated enough from reality so that the Columbine aspects are more a part of the story than the reason or overall message. The scope of Cadre's novel is a bit larger than that, and so the reader should definitely expect more.

There are some that might consider Ready, Okay! a young adult novel, but even though the main characters are teens, I get the feeling that Cadre did not write this just for a teen audience, but rather for anyone who will listen, because he really does have something to say that's worth listening to, or at least reading. (

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smichaelwilson | Dec 9, 2016 |

The very first sentence of this book tells you that it's not going to end happily. Lots of people are going to die. Within the first couple chapters you realize that they're going to die in a shooting, probably reminiscent of Columbine. And you are not mistaken. Don't get me wrong - this book is very funny. The characters are memorable, unique, and yet stunningly familiar to anyone who went to high school in the last decade (and perhaps longer; I don't know what high school was like before the early 1990s). Granted, my high school years were notably lacking in the sex, drugs, alcohol, and violence departments, but adolescents are still adolescents regardless of whether they're being self-destructive. The narrator's commentary on child and teenage communication is hilariously accurate, and I felt myself nodding along with a lot of the inanity.However, during the last hundred pages or so it starts to drag a bit. Tragedy after tragedy strikes, people start acting very much unlike teenagers (or real people at all), and there is a lengthy and rather disturbing discussion of nudism and incest. It's one of those books that I'm glad I read, but I'm also not surprised it wasn't what you might call critically acclaimed. Ultimately I think I would recommend this book to teenagers. It's most relevant to their lives; the rest of us are lucky enough to have lived through it already. (

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melydia | Oct 28, 2009 |

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For my sister

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The day I turned sixteen years old I had no idea that in four months nearly everyone I cared about would be dead.

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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)

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Handler, Daniel

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An unforgettable debut novel about the lives of a group of alienated teenagers in suburban California that Introduces a startling new voice in fiction. Meet Allen Mockery: "The day I turned sixteen years old I had no idea that in four months nearly everyone I cared about would be dead. Unburdened by this foreknowledge, it was with a free and unclouded spirit that I went down to the DMV and failed my driving test." So begins Adam Cadre's captivating, darkly comic story of teenage life in America in the new millennium, fold through the lives of Allen and a parade of friends and foes, each more vivid and memorable than the last: Peggy: "You can hit it off with all kinds of people, but once you've shared a counterespionage run with someone, well, that's the kind of bond that goes deeper than sharing your math notes." Siren: "They asked us what our career plans were and Siren said she was going to be a Laker Girl. Then we fed these milelong Scantrons into a computer and it said that the career that she was actually best suited for was Laker Girl." Echo: "Her eyes could bore a hole in you the size of a chicken pot pie and she always dressed entirely in black, which is pretty lame but certainly impresses the hell out of most fifteen-year-olds." Molly: "She had her own heater to make sure her room stayed a toasty eighty-four degrees. This probably would've been uncomfortably hot if not for the fact that Molly refused to wear any clothing whatsoever." These are just a few of the people you'll meet watching Allen and friends fry to shepherd one another through a minefield of violence, drugs, and parental abandonment as their story careens to its gripping ending. Adam Cadre has created a heartfelt, original novel that offers a new way of looking at the perennial struggles of teenagers. Ready, Okay! is just the right novel at the right time powerful and entertaining story that an entire generation of readers can embrace and call its own.

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