The Bar Code Tattoo

I needed a break from the dense nonfiction book I'm reading, so I picked this up, because I loved The Bar Code Tattoo when I was in middle school. I mean, I loved it. I didn't necessarily expect it to hold up, but this book is ridiculous. It's like if you combined Zenon (one of the best Disney Channel movies ever made, and the good bad I was seeking) with Black Mirror and maybe also They Live.

The Bar Code tattoo is set in 2025 USA. More and more people are getting bar codes tattooed on their wrists. It's so convenient! You can never lose forms of identification or payment. What could go wrong? Nothing nefarious is at work. Especially not eugenics. The protagonist is a high schooler named Kayla, whose parents are reeling from the impact of their tattoos. Mental illness and addiction play into this, and if you can believe it, neither are handled well.

Kayla begins spending time with some other high schoolers who are organizing against the tattoos. Society turns obviously dystopian overnight. Oddly, the resistant high schoolers are heavily centered in this global shift, with every news update naming at least one of them. Odder still, Kayla regularly struggles to remember how she feels about the tattoos and why, even though every decision she makes is based on her conviction they are the evilest evil.

A lot of other stuff happens (so much, actually), including some bizarre contention that being on the run and hiding out in the wilderness makes you quickly develop telepathy because of evolution (???). Anyway, suffice it to say, don't trust your middle school self.

Well that was pretty good.

I've tried to write this review 3-4 times so far and I can't seem to get into the right words how I feel, so here are some bullet points:

-it really seems to want to have one foot in our US and one foot in an alternate universe's US and it really can't figure out where on the timeline and in what parts of the culture and society is which.
-apparently it's set in 2025? I know you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit, but so many things changing so drastically in 9 years? no.
-the slang is so annoying
-getting rid of all paper money? no physical keys anymore? that really must be a part of the AU because that's another thing that's just not that believable.
-the short snippets and jumps in time really bothered me, especially since there was no separation in the text. It would seem to be the middle of a scene and then suddenly the next paragraph is 3 [days/weeks/etc] later. where'd that come from? It hurt the continuity of the text.
-The romances also really bothered me (in part that she would consent to being the ‘other woman', but that's beyond the point). It seemed like there was no development happening with each of them.