We all present different faces to different people: dutiful family member; one of the lads or girls with friends; several faces at work (often depending whether we’re talking to someone higher or lower on the pecking order); potential mate; and our online alter ego, to list but a few. They usually show a variety of facets of our underlying personality, but pretending to be someone else to get the girl of your dreams is entirely different.

When real and virtual lives collide for Jeff Brennan, it’s all too easy to start living a lie…

Jeff B is a bit of a lad. Slacker IT consultant by day, beer-swilling pizza-scoffing video-gaming lad by night, and caring but bored dutiful grandson when he visits his grandparents each Sunday. One of his mates, Marcus, is a political activist. Jeff finds himself going along to one of Marcus’s protests and there he bumps into Marie. He can’t believe his luck that a beautiful American girl is interested in him. However, it’s not him she falls for, it’s his namesake. Jeff Brennan is also the name of the top political blogger in the country. She has been following and commenting on his blog for ages…

"At first I never thought too much about you, the real person behind the blog. But as I read your posts in bed every night, I began to feel like you were speaking to me. The more I read, the more I felt like I knew you better than the people I saw every day.
When I told my friends about you, they teased me. ‘Find a real man, Marie,’ they’d say. ‘There’s no shortage.’ But, of course, you were real. You did exist, I just hadn’t met you yet. I’d already visited your blog, though, and left comments on it, and even emailed you. I’d scoured the web for pretty much everything you’d ever written, from the longest blog post – a three-page essay on the folly of the Iraq war – right down to the one-word replies on tech forums. I knew your views on politics, the environment and all the major issues, but I’d also seen you asking for help with your Linux interface and commenting on a recipe for blueberry and apple pie. I felt like I knew you much better than I knew a lot of my friends who denied your existence, and certainly better than a lot of the men who swarmed around me, attracted by my long black hair and my California accent but not really seeing me. You were real to me in every way except the physical, and surely that’s the least important. If I loved your mind, then of course I’d love your body too."

So when she bumps into our Jeff B at the protest, she thinks he’s the blogging Jeff B, and our one is only too happy to pretend to be the other. Marie is confused by Jeff’s refusal to talk about his blog – that’s work! But she sort of understands his need to keep his day-job to himself, (not knowing his real one of course). It’s an easy get-out for Jeff, and Marie slots into his life, eventually moving in with him, going to visit his grandparents (they love her). Eventually, as you might imagine, living this lie begins to get out of hand – and Jeff will find himself in a difficult place…

The novel thing about this book is that we never directly hear Jeff’s point of view. The entire book is told from the voices of those than interface with him – notably his grand-father and Marie, but also his friends and colleagues, and Marcus (through his tweets). The PoV swaps each chapter between them – so we see all the effects of the different faces that Jeff presents to the world. It’s a clever construct. But if we get to see all of Jeff’s faces, for most of the novel we are teased with not knowing the persona of the blogger Jeff – he’s an enigma. Poor Marie is befuddled by her hero-worship, and is taken in by all of this – but she’s young, she will survive. It’s his grand-father, whose life is subsumed by caring for his wife Daisy who has dementia, that we really feel for as the walls begin to crumble around Jeff.

It did take a few chapters to get into this book, getting used to the different narrators. Starting with Jeff’s grand-father and a long digression on his family heirloom clock which, in the immortal words of Pink Floyd, is ‘ticking away the moments that make up a dull day’, you might expect subsequent chapters to be equally nondescript – but this is a necessary set-up. It’s a brave choice to start a novel in this (Brooknerish?) way, but I persevered, and it changed.

Reading this novel certainly causes you to stop and think about your own identity – real and virtual. I’m quite shy and bad at small talk, but I’m sure I come across as more outgoing virtually on my blog than naturally in person. That distance enables me to act a part to a certain degree – the me I project is the me who’s already got to know you. That’s fine as far as blogging goes, but I couldn’t conceive of trying to negotiate a path through the minefields of on-line dating though!

I have made some really good friends through blogging and social networking – many of whom remain virtual. However, I have been lucky enough to meet some of my book-blogging friends in the flesh, and I can unreservedly say that they are all wonderful. Having met them on-line first so to speak can take a lot of the initial shyness away on both sides when meeting them properly. We can act as instant old friends if we’re lucky or get there more quickly, and I really like and appreciate that a lot.

I’m glad that, for me, real life doesn’t replicate that portrayed in A Virtual Love. But it is a cautionary tale, and makes one well aware that you need to pick your friends carefully. ( )

Those that have followed me for a while or that do so across the various forms of social media, are probably aware that my real? name is not Parrish or Parrish Lantern. Those that have checked out my "about page" will also know how a I came by this pseudonym. Like a lot of individual's over the years I've had a few alter egos that - like "Parrish" - have been what I have described as my Spiderman, Batman, or Silver surfer (choose one) superhero guise, by this I mean they represent a facet of my personality I like to think of as set free from those every day realities that shadow our persona's, free from the 9-5 mentality that pays for the Spiderman costume. I raise this issue now because of a book sent to me by the writer and fellow blogger Andrew Blackman.

Jeff Brennan has multiple online personalities and finds switching between them easier than dealing with his mundane offline existence. Jeff, depending on who he is dealing with can be a caring grandson, a bored IT consultant, avid gamer or committed eco warrior, it is this last one that completely changes his life. Whilst on a protest with a friend he meets the gorgeous Marie, a young American woman who works with the homeless. After the protest Jeff and Marie are introduced to each other and she, who on hearing his name, mistakes him for a famous, yet reclusive political blogger of the same name. Jeff decides to go along with this as a ruse to get a date with Marie, but as they fall in love and develop a relation, he has to come up with increasingly more desperate measures to keep the illusion alive. This all comes to a head when the reclusive blogger decides to attend a protest and introduces himself to Marie. I won’t divulge any more of the story, I will just leave you with some questions.

Will Jeff & Marie’s relationship survive this?

Will Jeff survive this?

How will famous Jeff deal with the other Jeff?

How will Andrew Blackman tie all the ends together ?

All this and much more make up the final section of this book and how Andrew brings it all together is as much fun as the book itself. A Virtual Love is an old, old tale told in new way, it is a tale of love and deception, but spun from new cloth, spun from Nano technology. In the modern world, where a great part of an individual’s life is played out on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Librarything or Goodreads etc. Where people whose interaction is more online whether this is purchase or play, what needs to be remembered - is how we relate to others and how we perceive those relations. In a world where one can form authentic relationships without physically meeting, one needs to occasionally remember that like all relationships - how you would like to be treated is how you should treat others. A Virtual Love is a great fun read that makes you smile whilst leaving you with a lot of questions. ( )

Jeff viene scambiato per un altro Jeff (uno più famoso) da una ragazza e inizia a basare su questo scambio la loro relazione.
Raccontato dai punti di vista di tutti (meno quello di Jeff) risulta un po' lento e noioso e con opinioni troppo estreme da ogni parte: l'anziano radicato nel passato, la vegana anarchica, il nerd mega genio dell'informatica.
Abbandonato.

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Jeff is mistaken for another Jeff (a more famous one) by a girl and he will start their relationship on this lie.
The novel follows the POV of everybody (apart Jeff - until I read at least) and is quite slow paced and boring with too much extreme opinions: the old man living in his past, the anarchic vegan and the informatics genius gamer.
Unfinished.

Marie, an American living in London, meets Jeff Brennan who seems to be just a regular guy. Somewhere in the world of technological communication is another Jeff Brennan, a blogger who Marie has admired for years. What can be the harm in the ordinary guy allowing her to believe that he is that famous blogger? Quite a lot as it turns out. Trying to maintain a relationship based on pretence was never going to be easy and so we begin a rollercoaster ride of emotions as Jeff wriggles out of one disaster to another.

This second novel from Andrew Blackman is a beautifully written, thought provoking read. He examines the impact of how we relate to each other in the twenty first century. A century where emailing, blogging,tweeting and the ever present Facebook dominate our lives. You can feel Blackman's grief at the passing of the small things that make us human. How we have allowed technology to take the place of face to face interaction. When did an email or a post become more effective than a radiant smile, the holding of a loved one's hand, an embrace or a kind gesture?

Told from both Marie and Jeff's perspective and that of their friends and family, my favourite character, by far, is Jeff's grandad. A former journalist, now in his eighties, he struggles to understand the importance of all this technology malarky! His day to day life revolves around his beloved wife, who has dementia, and it is through him we begin to understand what we have given away in return for supposedly instant forms of communictaion.

I loved Andrew Blackman's first novel "On the Holloway Road" and this novel had just as much impact. A very talented writer with a supreme gift of bringing his characters to life and leaving them to keep you company for some time after you turn the last page. ( )