Plausible plot, easy read. Will recommend for middle school

This book was good. I enjoyed reading it and thought the characters were pretty entertaining. I found the aspects about the character's app to be less believable, only because it seemed like a pretty simplistic concept compared to the other apps that were mentioned. I had a hard time believing it would be chosen to compete against the other games in the Games 4 Good contest. All in all though I think it is a worthwhile addition to any library collection, especially for those libraries where coding and hackathons and whatnot are popular with the middle grade crowd.

This was a very wonderful and timely book.

I loved that Allie developed her own app and did so great with that part of her life. BUT I loved even more that her friends didn't change for her after that and she had to deal with the consequences of bad code.

This is a topic that even adults wouldn't have handled as well. Allie' s friendship is inspiring and her drive to fix her app is amazing and motivating.

This is definitely a book I would recommend for a number of reasons. First, it really does show that young adults are able to make a difference. Second, it shows that girls can do anything guys can do and that gender should not be a deciding factor in what one thinks they can accomplish. Finally, it is a tale of caution for what can go wrong with cell phones and a wonderful example of good digital citizenship and real life connections.

A wonderful book that all will enjoy - not just middle grades.

Title: Click’d
Author: Tamara Ireland Stone
Release Date: September 7, 2017
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Spoilers: Low

Click’d is an amazing middle grade novel that reminds girls that they can do anything – including take on the tech industry! Written by an author who knows her way around code, Click’d combines a fun and easily relatable story with a great message that young readers will hopefully take to heart.
The book does a phenomenal job of embracing the idea that we should be encouraging more young women to pursue STEM related fields without making it seem too heavy handed. Readers see how much our heroine, Allie Navarro, loves coding and hopefully find themselves inspired to follow her lead.

Click’d follows Allie over the course of about a week as she works on an application she hopes will win her top honors at the upcoming Games for Good competition. After spending the summer working on her app (also called Click’d) at a special coding camp for girls, she thinks she’s got it in the bag. Click’d was designed to help people make new friends and connect through common interests by alerting them to people nearby that they would “click” with. It’s not an app that would save the world necessarily, but it’s something that could still help people make meaningful connections.

Allie’s invites her friends at home to check out the app, but soon the whole school is playing along. The popularity of Click’d propels Allie into middle school stardom but it also reveals some serious problems with her code. She had hoped the larger user base would help her test the code but the problem she ends up facing is a big deal.

Something really great about this book is that there are problems with the app and the code.

Without getting too technical, the author really highlights the challenges and puzzle-solving nature of working with code. If you’re thinking that means the book is riddled with lines of code and technical terms don’t worry – it’s not. Tamara Ireland Stone does a great job of keeping these parts of the story accessible to readers regardless of their prior knowledge.

While a lot of the book focuses on Click’d, the app’s popularity, and Allie’s eventual race against time to fix her code and protect everyone’s privacy, Click’d is just as much about human interactions as it is the game. Allie has a great group of friends and a solid support system in both her computer teacher and her family. She also has a ‘rival’ named Nathan who is just as competitive, over achieving, and code savvy as her.

Throughout the book we see how the app – as well as its popularity and its problems – begin to affect those relationships.

This is where I think the book truly shines.

We know that Allie is very smart and that she’s a very capable coder. But these relationships also help us see her as any other middle grade heroine – or reader for that matter. She doesn’t have to be super nerdy to be into computers and coding. She has a great group of friends (who aren’t coders themselves), a variety of interests, and similar motivations to anyone her age. She just also happens to love computers and coding. Allie doesn’t meet that ‘nerd’ stereotype that young people still so often associate with science and technology.

Allie is a fully fleshed out, relatable character who truly embodies that idea that any girl can embrace STEM.

And at the end Tamara Ireland Stone doesn’t just wrap up the story but she also encourages readers to try out coding for themselves. There is a referral to the code.org website along with a couple of quick and easy activities for readers right in the book. Whether or not the reader follows up with these activities will obviously depend on the individual, but I like that they are included just in case anyone takes Allie’s story to heart and thinks maybe they’d like to try out coding.

Click’d is a great book with a fun story and an even greater message for kids – especially young girls – who might be considering getting into coding. This was one of my most anticipated middle grade releases of the year and I had really high hopes for it. I am so happy to say it did not disappoint! I only wish I could get this book into the hands of every single young reader.

Girls who love science – or just girls who love apps and great stories – are going to love Click’d and they’re going to love Allie’s story. I can’t recommend this one enough!

[A REVIEW COPY WAS PROVIDED FOR THE PURPOSE OF THIS REVIEW]

Loved the connection to girls and coding plus some important digital citizenship lessons as well. This was a great middle school book.

Allie spent her summer at a coding camp where she developed a game called Click'd. It was so good that she has been asked to present the game at a Games for Good competition. Unfortunately her nemesis, Nathan, has a game that was also chosen.

Worried that her game, that promotes friendship, might not have enough "good" she decides to release it to her school early to get success stories. Unfortunately she soon discovers an issue with the app choosing pictures out of a device's camera roll instead of just from Instagram which leads to some embarrassing situations. Can she fix her popular game before the competition.

Really liked this!!! It will be a great discussion starter.

I really liked this story about Allie, who is a coder. She is hoping to win a competition with a game she invented at a coding camp over the summer. She intends to put it out as a limited release but it takes on a life of it's own. And suddenly there are glitches. She's not sure who to reach out to to try and fix it and should she fix it now (to save her friend) or later (so she can win the competition. This is a lovely story about friendship and coding and making hard choices.

Finished Click'd by Tamara Ireland Stone. I received a copy for review.





Allie has created a new app that is supposed to help you find friends. You take a simple quiz and then it alerts you when compatible people are nearby. It quickly becomes a huge success in her middle school and things are great...until there's a glitch. Sometimes it shares photos that aren't public.





This was such a fun book and I absolutely devoured it. I love that Allie was so driven, even at such a young age, and that she created this awesome, fun app that people loved. At the same time, I love that she ALSO has these great relationships with her parents and friends. She is a well-rounded character and not a weirdo with no friends. I think most MG readers could relate to her.





If you know someone who's a reluctant reader, this could be what changes that. It also would be great for mother/daughter book clubs or to encourage an interest in STEM subjects.

Click’d by Tamara Ireland Stone
Allie Navarro attended the Girls Code Camp summer camp. She developed what she feels is a winning app. Arriving back at school she shares the app to her best friends who had summer experiences without her. Allie during her summer camp experience developed friendships outside of her school friends. The soft app launch goes well until the entire school download it.
This quick read has it all for middle school readers, a little romance, drama and conflict. Young readers will identify the middle school scene and begin to root for Allie and Nathan. Allie is a strong female character who is driven to win the coding competion. Hand this title to a girls who are beginning to learn coding to understand where they can go with their new found knowledge. This book would also be a great book club selection with the emphasis of the conflict between the desire to win at all costs vs. protecting friends and users privacy. Looking for a similar book for older teens, hand them a copy of When Dimple Meets Rishi.
I received an ARC ebook from Netgalley and the publisher, Disney Hyperion in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely adored this book. I know it’s a middle-grade novel, but I really think the high schoolers would check this out of my library as well.

Who doesn’t remember the angst of that age? And as high schoolers, they would be close to the ages of the characters—flashbacks, here they come!

Summary (from Goodreads):

Allie Navarro can't wait to show her best friends the app she built at CodeGirls summer camp. CLICK'D pairs users based on common interests and sends them on a fun (and occasionally rule-breaking) scavenger hunt to find each other. And it's a hit. By the second day of school, everyone is talking about CLICK'D.

Watching her app go viral is amazing. Leaderboards are filling up! Everyone's making new friends. And with all the data Allie is collecting, she has an even better shot at beating her archenemy, Nathan, at the upcoming youth coding competition. But when Allie discovers a glitch that threatens to expose everyone's secrets, she has to figure out how to make things right, even if that means sharing the computer lab with Nathan. Can Allie fix her app, stop it from doing any more damage, and win back the friends it hurt-all before she steps on stage to present CLICK'D to the judges?

New York Times best-selling author Tamara Ireland Stone combines friendship, coding, and lots of popcorn in her fun and empowering middle-grade debut.


My Thoughts:

I read Click’d in one day. That’s how much I really enjoyed Stone’s story.

The one thing I enjoy so much about realistic fiction is that, well, it could really happen. Sometimes when I read a middle-grade novel I notice the writer gets the “feel” of being in middle school wrong, but Stone did not. Not even a little.

This book is all heart and passion—heart and passion in the STEM world.

We have Allie, a middle schooler who loves to code. She loves to code so much that she went to GirlsCode camp, and while there she wrote a pretty cool game that middle schoolers would devour on their phones.

We have Nathan, another middle school who loves to code—and he seems to always one-up Allie. He begins are her archnemesis, but it becomes clear that he really is just her rival.

They both love to code. And they both love to compete. What does that mean in the greater scheme of the story? It’s a reminder that people are not always as they appear; that having a rival and loving competition is healthy, but so is being there to help one another when the chips are down.

While Allie is the main player here, and while Nathan has an important role to play in her world of code, we cannot ignore the secondary characters. Allie has three best friends, two supportive parents, and one teacher who serves as her mentor. These secondary characters help Allie on her journey—and I really enjoyed them.

Stone balances the world of a middle schooler and her friends and family nicely. Sometimes that can become too much in a middle grade read, but that is not the case here. Each has an important role to play, and Stone lets them play those roles.

The pacing of the story is right on. Stone gives Allie just one week to test out her code before having to compete on a bigger stage. One week in the life of a middle schooler is really a year. And man, a lot happens in that week.

There’s angst. There’s laughs. There’s excitement. New friendships are formed. Others are tested.

But in the end, it all comes together in a realistic way. Nothing about this book made me go, “Yeah right. Like that would happen.” And that’s lovely. That is definitely not always the case.

I found Allie to be an especially mature character, even in her language. But my son is the same age, and he loves books and computers, and when I hear him with his friends, this is what they sound like. Middle schoolers do not engage the way they did when I myself was a middle schooler, and I appreciate Stone keeping true to the 2017 tween.

I plan to put this on my library shelf soon. We have a strong robotics program at my school, and I feel like there are many of the girls in that program who could appreciate what Stone is giving readers in this book, even if they are in high school.

What’s the best realistic fiction STEM book you’ve read lately? I am always looking for recommendations to build my collection.


Happy Reading!

- The Hodgenator

Received a copy of this via Netgalley.com in exchange for a review.

While not my normal reading material, this was a fascinating read for a middle-grade and near-YA readership. CLICK'D has a solid and very engaging group of characters, situations, and realistic interactions with far more depth than much of the fiction made available when I was closer to these kids in age.

I'd recommend this book for anyone wanting a good female protagonist and any interest at all in coding or other STEM related skills. Very positive portrayals of both the ups and down of technology and social media.

This was a great MG book! I love the concept behind the app Allie creates and also the concept behind the book. The moral/lesson is both timeless and timely, and one I think tweens will really get. I think my favorite part is the girl-coder role model, and how dedicated Allie is to the craft and her app!

4 Stars - Entertaining and Inspiring

Click’d is a such a delightful coming of age story. I’ve never read anything by Tamara Ireland Stone, but that’s definitely going to change.

The plot is fast-paced, easy to read, and so much fun. For a middle grade book, I was surprisingly very entertained.. but beyond that, Click’d also has heart. Stone delivers empowering messages that apply not only to children or tweens, but to also to adults like me. That’s what I truly love about this book…that I can walk away with something more than just a few laughs here and there. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I love stories that seem simple, but definitely packs a punch. Being successful does not mean winning, but working through your failures and never giving up. It’s about taking a leap and really believing in yourself to achieve whatever goals you have.

I really love the idea of creating Apps and using technology to do some good and make the world a better place. We definitely need more of that right now. Allie and Nathan are such great role models. I absolutely admired them for being creative, passionate, and determined. I don’t have any experience with coding, but it must take a lot of hard work and patience to be able to do what they did. Their commitment and enthusiasm with their projects was absolutely inspiring. I also loved the growing friendship between them and it was so adorable to watch them work together and become great friends. I liked the side characters too. Allie’s friends and everyone seemed genuine and realistic.

Overall, I really enjoyed this story – it’s heartwarming, beautifully written, engaging, and inspiring.

Rating: 2.5 Stars

I picked Click’d up because I read Tamara Ireland Stone’s book Every Last Word last year and loved it. I think it was even a 5 star read for me. When I saw a new book from her that was about young game developers, I thought it would be an interesting read.

I want to start off this review by saying that while I rated it 2.5 stars, I can see that it was a case of the book not being for me. I can see how a lot of other people might enjoy the book, but I spent more than a few minutes while reading it being frustrated with how things were going, being presented, and ending up.

Allie, the main character, starts out the book having finished a summer activity at a CodeGirls Camp, designed for young women to spend the summer developing app ideas and working on their skills. At the summit presentation that Allie gave, she presents a bare bones version of how Click’d would work. Reading about it, the app itself as presented then didn’t sound special. The premise sounds nice, but basing the connections it makes off a small, generic quiz, something you might see on BuzzFeed, didn’t make it special enough to warrant the attention it’s creator Allie was getting from her computing teacher or the camp personnel. That a young person could code well enough to make an app is impressive because that sort of work seems hard to me, but the end product was average at best.

Things did sound marginally more interesting when Allie showed the app to her school friends a couple of days later, but it was still ordinary. I felt like calling it a game was a bit of a stretch. The scavenger hunt aspect might count, but Nathan, Allie’s classmate/arch-nemesis, had an actual game that sounded more interesting and overall “good” than Allie’s. In fact, I felt a bit let down when we found out the range of other games that were presented at Games for Good, the competition happening a week into the school year that Allie’s computing teacher Ms. Slade nominates her for. When looking at the other developers and their work, Click’d was never something that would’ve won. As the main character, I would’ve thought that she’d have something more in line with Nathan’s game which facilitates raising funds for Habitat for Humanity, or another student whose game brings fresh drinking water to those in need.

The timing aspect in the book felt strange as well. It was odd that the time Allie had with her mentor before the competition Games for Good was so short. Is a week really enough time to refine an app, test it, etc.? Why did Allie need a mentor for five days when she’d spent all summer working on it with supervision? A recommendation and that should’ve been it for Ms. Slade, who didn’t end up actually doing a whole lot in her mentor capacity.

Click’d also doesn’t take into account the sheer weirdness of Instagram. It takes a photo from your timeline as a clue for the scavenger hunt aspect, but how will that help if you take pictures of your pets, of books?

I will say that the friendships portrayed throughout the book seemed very real. I pretty much blocked out everything that happened to me between 7th and 12th grade, but what I do remember from right before that in elementary school was that friends were like this. You got mad, but it generally got better a lot quicker than it does when you’re older, when you can hold a grudge. I didn’t quite get the relationship, if it can be called that, between Allie and Nathan though. It felt like that was one partnership that never got resolved, other than their were “enemies” at the beginning and then things were better b the time the Games for Good competition rolled around. There didn’t seem to be real resolution to the problems they had communicating, just…hey, we helped each other’s game problems, we’re all good. O.o I know I said relationships at that age I remember as resolving quickly, but these two didn’t have a friendship that would facilitate that kind of recovery.

All in all I thought Click’d was an okay book for me, though I probably wouldn’t’ read it again. I like middle grade books for the most part, but I think this was one of those times were it would be better enjoyed by the actual target age group rather than adults that enjoy the genre.

"I received this e-ARC via NetGalley. A huge thank you to the publisher for accepting my request. All thoughts are my own."

Click'd is a gripping middle grade book, focusing on friendship, success, hard work, responsibility and family ties. From the very beginning the reader is introduced to this whole other world: the world of coding. For me personally that was a totally foreign concept and getting to see the "behind the scenes" of an app was a very fascinating experience. 

Allie was an amazing protagonist. She is strong willed, hard working and determined. She is more or less a genius since she built this amazing app all on her own at the age of 12(!). Just like every 12 year old, she's strumbling to find her place in this world and as so, she makes mistakes and tries -in the best way she can- to fix them.

An aspect I really enjoyed was the friendship. Allie has a solid friend group consisted of three girls: Emma, Zoe and Madie. They work together, play together, go to school together and do what friends are supposed to do. Unfortunately good frienships are lacking in books, so I'm thirsty for them whenever I get them. Also she has her CodeGirl friends whom she did not forget the moment she stepped off camp, which I also appreciated. 

Finally, I liked the messages Click'd conveyed. It is a tradition for MG books to have a message right? 

The first was a message of not confusing competition with animosity. Just because you are competing with someone for a job, a competion, a test, it doesn't mean that you have to hate them. Sometimes we have more things in common with our competitors that we know. And most of the times, competition is what makes us move forward; the need to do more, to succeess, to be the best. We should not, however, let that need consume us and makes us jealous and hating.
The second was a message of responsibility. In life we screw up and make mistakes all the time. The key is to take responsibility for said mistakes and not blame others for the things you failed to do. In order to learn from our mistakes and become better we have to realise we actually made a mistake in the first place, and that this mistake was a result of our own actions. 
Overall, Click'd was a nice MG book with cute characters and nice messages!

Click'd comes out September 5th! Don't forget to grab a copy!

Click'd is the story of Allie, an aspiring game developer and middle school student. While at coding camp she creates an app that then takes over the school, then problems arrise and she has to figure out how to fix them or shut the app down.

I loved this book. Young girls coding and working in STEM fields is amazing andwe need more books about them. I felt like her problems were relevant to middle school and were dealt with well. I really liked the interaction with her nemesis and how they competed and then found some common ground. I also liked how the ending wasn't completely predicatable and more realistic.

Overall this book was really good and am excited for girls everywhere to read it.

Click’d is a book I really liked and found very cute and whatnot, but I wouldn’t really read it again mainly because it’s targeted to a younger age, it’s a middle grade book and while I was reading it, it really felt like a middle grade book and that thought never left my head which I didn’t like, if I was to describe or explain the book I would start with “well it’s a middle grade book…” which, to me, means that the story didn’t catch me enough to get past that.

This book tells the story of Allie and her app, Click’d, which she developed over the summer at camp qualifying for a coding competition which is huge for Allie, she goes back to school and shows Click’d to her friends who convince her to start sharing it around school and surely, soon enough everyone was using Click’d. But a little mistake in her code starts to show when secrets are revealed and Allie is faced with a huge problem that might cost her the competition.

As I said, I really liked this book, what I liked the most was the concept and representation that it gives, since it’s targeted to such a young age, it’s important for girls, specially girls that young, to know that it’s not a “boys thing”, girls can code if they want to, they can develop apps, games, build websites, they have endless possibilities, they just have to know they can do it and that’s what I really loved about this book.

In conclusion, I think every young girl should read this book to know she can do anything she wants and be absolutely awesome at it, but for me, personally, I wouldn’t read it again, it wasn’t really my cup of tea, I’m a contemporary romance type of girl, but that’s just me. Tamara Ireland Stone did an amazing job with this book so here’s to here and to inspiring young girls.

This book talks about code, apps and social networking which is the language of our tween readers. It is a fairly typical middle school friend novel, learn from your mistakes etc. Because there were many friends they weren’t well developed and i was sometimes hard to keep track. This will interest student readers who are into apps, coding and technology.

I liked this book! It's about coding which I'm not familiar with,but even though,it was interesting and it can encourage kids to try it out,especially girls. I may be too old for this book,but pre teens and teens will love it,I'm sure!

Great for techies, an absorbing and App-centred story that isn't too long for even reluctant readers

Not one that will easily draw from older age groups as some books for this age range do, Click'd will be a great choice to offer to those who like their computers, coding, technology, social media.

Allie is a coder, and at summer camp has designed her own app that helps you find friends with common interest - Click'd. It works brilliantly when she tests it on her friends before entering it at a national competition, alongside a fellow student (and rival's) app.

But when a problem becomes apparent, Allie is faced with tough decisions, and even finds that her app is straining her relationships with her friends.

The themes are very much 'middle school' centred, which may seem too immature for older readers/teenagers. There is no romance, and Allie's home and family life is only briefly featured - it's all about her friendships, rivalry with Nathan, and mostly - her App.

Which isn't a bad thing - it will interest many readers, and though I'm not a techie myself, I enjoyed the story. I could see myself, a Judy Blume fan at that age (10-13) being caught up in Allie's world and problems, and liked the choices Allie makes.

Some good questions and discussions could come out of this. Though it features a female protagonist, boys will also find a lot here to capture their interest as well, including the character of Nathan. Could make a good class read for Year 6 or 7 classes.

With thanks to Netgalley for the advance reading copy.

I had the opportunity to read a digital ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for this review. I really enjoyed this middle grade fiction story that has likable characters, a STEM plot that taps into kids’ obsession with social media apps, and good messages about friendship and making good decisions.

Seventh grader Allie Navarro has just spent the summer at CodeGirls Camp developing a really cool friendship social media app/game called Click’d. Designed to help strangers find new friends that have compatible interests, the app has users complete profile quizzes, and uses sound effects and pictures from Instagram accounts to help friends find each other in a type of scavenger hunt. During the first week of school, her app is a huge hit at her middle school and hundreds of new users download the app right away. Her app is so awesome that her computer science teacher is mentoring her in a big contest that upcoming weekend. But when Allie discovers a glitch in the program that allows users’ private pictures from their phones to become very public, she realizes she's going to have to fix the code in order to salvage her app before the competition.

I think this would be a terrific book to share with middle grade students. The main character, Allie, is a relatable girl who embraces the “computer geek” inside her, but also has a group of close friends and participates on a soccer team. She deals with the normal middle school stressors of homework and friend drama, along with her technology talents.

Middle grade students of the iGen generation cling to their phones and spend a colossal amount of time texting and relating to each other through social media. I think this book definitely taps into that in a positive way. I think this will be a very popular book with kids in grades 5 - 8!