Friday, January 25, 2013

This Is Not a Test

by Courtney Summers

Grade: 2 stars
Story: It's the zombie apocalypse. Six teenagers have managed to seek refuge in an abandoned school.

Thoughts: Really not my kind of book.

1. Zombies. I don't like them. I don't like the characters that seem to show up in books about them. I don't particularly like the plots that generally surround them. Even the epic show-down between zombies and unicorns, Zombies vs. Unicorns, edited by Justine Larbalestier and Holly Black, couldn't bring any love of zombie fiction into my heart.

2. Teenagers. Stuck together. At the end of the world. Making out and drinking games ensue. Not really my cup of tea.

3. Seriously, it's really depressing. Now here's where I actually liked one aspect: the central character, Sloane, is abused and suicidal, and it goes into her thought processes a fair bit. This was really interesting and (along with the well-done suspense) raised it to 2 stars, but when you add tons of death and gross dead people walking around to an abused and suicidal main character, the results are not particularly pleasant.

2 comments:

Aquinas' Goose said...

The one thing to keep in mind about zombies is that what is popular in horror fiction reveals the fears of the society that creates them... now look outside at all the people hunched over cell phones, stuck in cubicles and who have been emotionally desensitized... (But I must agree, I dislike zombies and the whole zombie genre)

RED said...

Good point. And zombies certainly are popular these days.