The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak

The Impossible Fortress by Jason Rekulak by Simon & Schuster is a funny, nice, book with a lot of thematic inside, some of them heavy and this book is just apparently light.

Every nostalgic ex teenager of the 1980s will love it so badly.

Robert Redford in 1987 hadn't won yet any Oscar, the movie this gang of three friends loved to watch compulsively for 18 times Kramer vs. Kramer with Dustin Hoffman. Not bad. A gang of intellectuals but teenagers in the 1980s were a mix of all of it. Brain and hormones.

Tom Cruise was the protagonist of Top Gun, Michael Jackson a genius, Carol Alt a beautiful model.

While I was reading this book I thought at the differences of our actual society and  the one of the 1980s.

Reality was completely different.
There was a different candor in the 1980s, a different approach to life, there was shame, there was the idea of sin but also there were adults that didn't want to give anything to teenagers or children before their proper age.
This, I guess, for avoiding any kind of hurt in the harmonic development of their personality.
 
World is now a free land where nothing is prohibited but normal and the old taboos all gone.

In the past society more closed, more structured, and it's in this historical moment that we fall like magically. It's 1987.
World was going on well, people appeared all happy and cheerful.

Problems of course existed but mainly were the ones lived by the protagonist of this book and his friends: how to enter in possess of some issues of Playboy with the current Wheel of Fortune starlet Vanna White in cover without veils, so after all not great problems. Apparently.

It would be a comical book this one because the boys try all their best, spending a lot of money, for searching to buy this magazine but this book wants also to let us reflect, not just smile.

In this little town of New Jersey there is a store owns by a certain Zelinsky and his daughter Mary.
It sells a lot of stuff magazines and newsmagazines included.

Billy Marvin the protagonist of this story is not at all great at school. At home he has a PC. If you lived your teen age age in the 1980s you will remember BASIC, Pascal, Cobol lessons at school.

Well: It wasn't just a story of codes. It was possible also to create games with that PCs and well Billy wants to do this in his life.
A primordial Internet thanks to CompuServe.

Billy thanks to Mary the daughter of mr Zelinsky  discover that there is a competition for the best video-game.

The one Billy developed lately pretty embarrassing. It was the imagine of this naked girl and his friends still complaining because not yet perfect.

Maybe The Impossible Fortress a best choice.

The Impossible Fortress is a video-game of a princess and someone who should reinstitute her freedom after a long fight.

Billy abandoned by his dad, is grown up by his mom with a lot of sacrifices. At school he is misunderstood by teachers because not receiving good votes teachers think that he is incompetent, while simply Billy wants to do something else in his life and also, if he put all his energy for the creation of video-games he can't study a lot.

Billy & Friends want to obtain in a way or in another Playboy prohibited to them but how can they do that?

They ask to Billy of stealing the secret code of access of the store of mr Zelinsky. Billy in fact goes there every day for working with Mary at the development of the video game The Impossible Fortress.

And he promise to his friends to do that.

A lot of problems for Billy but Billy won't be the only one who is hiding something important.

Mary will also hide him a secret too big for being shared with lightness.


I can't tell you that you will just find lightness reading this book, because the life of this teenagers very complicated, with problems at home, at school, with love and sex, society, relationship and with the construction of their own character and identity.

I can just tell you that this book is a jewel because it portrays a year the 1987 and a society perfectly.

Thanks to NetGalley and Simon &Schuster for this book.


Anna Maria Polidori