The Net

by Leonore Fleischer

Angela Bennett lives the life of a computer geek: she works from home as a contract employee of Cathedral Software as a software analyst, lives a reclusive life on her computer and as such has few friends or acquaintances who even know what she looks like. Even her mother, who has Alzheimer's, no longer recognizes her.

Cathedral's fortunes in the computer software world are increasing with what looks to be the universally used Gatekeeper security program, which they developed. During a period when Angela is dealing with what looks to be a virus in one of Cathedral's new games, she takes a vacation to Mexico. There, she meets and falls for the suave Jack Devlin... but Jack is not all he seems: he works for the Praetorians, who have stolen Angela's identity - and provided her with a new identity with a criminal history...

Genres: Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Leonore Fleischer has written more than fifty novelizations of films. She and her five cats live in Upstate New York.

Reviews

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the film The Net has dated slightly, with the chunky laptops, and dial up internet, it's still true today, that everyone's lives are online these days. So I was excited to pick up the novelization, and see if it would shed anymore light on some of the more complex scenes.

With this, there are a few extra lines of dialogue, which were cut probably from the final film, for running time. There's also lots of background to the characters, with more mentions of Angela's mum, and what happened to her. There's also an additional scene with Angela in the supermarket, showing more of her isolation, and how fearful she is in crowded situations.

The intro scenes, the one with the Under Secretary and the introduction to Angela, have been switched around, so the book starts with Angela, rather than the Under Secretary, like the film. I found this quite an interesting switch, and one that I felt could have worked either way.

The major annoying thing about this book is the amount of repetitive description about the characters, particularly Angela - how many times did the author need to reference her "dark red hair", the cleft in her chin, her full shapely lips and how self conscious she was? This was mentioned at the beginning of the book, with Angela's introduction, with repetitions scattered throughout the rest of the book. It got quite annoying after a while, and almost detracted from the book - the author has described the character once, we haven't forgotten what she looks like!

Overall, a good novelization, with more background, but the repetitiveness brings it down for me. Worth picking up for cheap, if you like the film.

[Paxton Holley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a pretty good adaptation, particularly in the first half. The last half is surprisingly faithful to the movie with very few embellishments.

[Joana Rodrigues · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had SUCH a thing for Sandra Bullock when I was about 13, and I was just obsessed with this movie! It's probably even more hilariously bad now that it's not the mid-90s. The book was a pretty decent tie-in too, still managed to keep things exciting.