Review: Quarantine: The Loners

Goodreads Summary:

It was just another ordinary day at McKinley High—until a massive explosion devastated the school. When loner David Thorpe tried to help his English teacher to safety, the teacher convulsed and died right in front of him. And that was just the beginning.

A year later, McKinley has descended into chaos. All the students are infected with a virus that makes them deadly to adults. The school is under military quarantine. The teachers are gone. Violent gangs have formed based on high school social cliques. Without a gang, you’re as good as dead. And David has no gang. It’s just him and his little brother, Will, against the whole school.

In this frighteningly dark and captivating novel, Lex Thomas locks readers inside a school where kids don’t fight to be popular, they fight to stay alive.

Note: Received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

My Review:
I have two sons- one of them a teenager. I was just bemoaning the fact that there's a point at which boys seem to stop reading. Say around age 9-12. Why? To some extent, they run out of stuff to read. There is just not enough fiction being published that's appealing to teenage boys. So, they don't read and because they don't read, nothing much gets published that teenage boys will like. Because it won't sell, because teenage boys don't read. Kind of a big circular mess, actually. I'm mentioning this because if you have a teenage boy at home who is a reluctant reader, this is the book for him. In fact, this would be my 2012 pick for Reluctant Male Readers.

However, I think the very things that boys will like about this book are things that (some) parents may have problems with. For starters, it's violent. Not just violent, but it contains very graphic violence. Second, there are sexual situations. For me personally as a parent, I find violence and sex in books less offensive and troublesome than in movies, TV, and video games. There's something about having a visual image that's more disturbing and video mediums lack the ability to convey the thought processes going on in a character's head. That whole gratuitous sex and violence thing that I think is common in movies, TV, and video games and is actually relatively rare in YA books.

There are two major things that are appealing in this book. The first is a must for teenage boys- that something is always happening. This book is well-paced and there are constant twists, turns, and action. The plot consistently moves forward. As a parent, the thing I most liked about the book was the relationship between the two brothers- David and Will. I have two sons and my husband is one of four boys- three of them even went to high school at the same time. I found the relationship between David and Will to be both real and touching. The authors really captured the love/hate/competition thing that brothers- especially those close in age- seem to have.

Overall Rating: 3 1/2 stars
Genre Rating: 4 school lockers

Author's Website (Author is running a giveaway for a Quarantine Prize Pack on website)
Author's Twitter
There is also a Goodreads giveaway of this book- 5 autographed copies- that ends on July 6, 2012.