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Mother of God, was this depressing. I still feel sad when I think about it, and it's been almost a week since I finished it!

Short, brutal YA novelette about a teen romance souring amidst, basically, the collapse of civilization. The authorial voice is spot-on teen, and it lends a wonderful spin on the “unreliable narrator” conceit: such as when we discover, via our unreliably-narrating teen hero, that they're all covered in lesions... and this is probably because Earth's environment is f*ked... well, damn.

There's not much in the way of plot, really. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl get their brain/internet connections hacked. One gets better, one gets a lot worse. It's mostly an exploration of a place (imagine the worst dystopia you can, and then populate it by completely brainless teenagers) and feelings (which, oh man, did they ring true). And it basically makes you want to (a) NEVER BUY/CONSUME ANYTHING AGAIN, and (b) NEVER USE THE INTERNET AGAIN.

I might have to read some techno-utopianism now, like Doctorow, to feel like I'm not contributing to the slide into horrible decay by just writing this review on Goodreads. Instead of, you know, being outside planting trees and reading Thoreau.

Edited, almost 1.5 years later: Upping the stars to full five, because I've been thinking about this book - and admiring its prescient genius - a lot since reading it.