Many Lives to Live: Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde

I had actually received my birthday gift from my father on time, which might have been a sign he was making an effort to be a more considerate and involved dad. Of course, if he was really considerate and involved, he wouldn't have had his secretary call to ask me what kind of gift certificate I wanted for my birthday.

With said certificate in hand, Giannine Bellisario picks her way through demonstrators from CPOC (Citizens to Protect Our Children) outside to celebrate her fourteenth birthday with a half hour of virtual reality gaming at the Rasmussen Gaming Center.

Giannine chooses (mostly for the good looks of its computer-generated guys) Heir Apparent, a thirty-minute total immersion game in which she plays the role of a poor shepherdess who learns that she is the long-hidden, illegitimate daughter of the just-deceased King Cynric. As the game begins she awakes to find herself Janine de St. Jehan, stinking of sheep, taken away from her supposed family by the king's messenger to meet her royal relatives. Thinking herself in for a a half hour of gaming in an exotic setting, Giannine/Janine begins to role-play her part, passing a riddling rhyming test with an axe-wielding dwarf and arriving at the palace to a chilly welcome from queen and her half-brothers, Princes Wulfgar, Abas, and Kenric.

Just as Giannine/Janine is getting the hang of navigating the political landmine at court and dodging the malevolent magic that someone or something is throwing at her, a white-robed figure descends from roiling clouds to inform her of "a slight emergency": sorry to interrupt, but the CPOC demonstrators have broken into the Rasmussen Gaming Center and disabled most of their equipment--meaning that her only escape from the virtual game is to win, i.e., make all the right choices to become the new king. Not to worry, but staying in the game too long may have fatal consequences for her brain!

Yikes! With some mumbled hints about a ring and two of the characters, the robed figure is swallowed up in the sky, and Giannine/Janine is left to play the game--over and over and over--until all the right moves allow her to become king. Along the way she is stabbed by one or the other of her half-brothers, shot with arrows by a horde of barbarians, poisoned by a beautiful but treacherous sorceress, and, well, succumbs in most of the ways there are to expire in a medieval fantasy game. Tough and plucky, Giannine/Janine resets herself over and over as she locates the kingdom's purloined treasure, searches a burial crypt and fights off angry ghosts, outwits the sorcerers and royal advisers, defeats a dragon, recovers a magical crown, and saves her kingdom from the barbarians, deftly marrying off the snooty old queen to their leader.

Vivian Vande Velde's Heir Apparent is a clever game itself, playing with the border between science fiction virtual reality and medieval fantasy games. Vande Velde definitely wins that game, but not without a joust with the repetitious elements necessarily built into her plot. Giannine Bellisario is one of Vande Velde's great girl heroines, opinionated, blessed with self-deprecatory, sarcastic humor, invincible determination, obvious flexibility, and the ability to think on her virtual feet. This book has something for almost everyone--adventure, suspense, fantasy, futuristic gaming, a smart, slightly alienated teen, and even a hint of a future love interest as Giannine awakes, like a futuristic Sleeping Beauty, to the real world again.