Sunday, July 1, 2012

Review: Quarantine: The Loners

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.
The Loners



3 comments:

  1. Hi! visiting from my site. I really like your blog. I am now following you. Thank you for your comment on my blog. We are a very diverse group but we do also read some of the same books so I plan on having some joint reviews in the very near future!

    Sabrina
    http://bythecoverbookclub.blogspot.com

    ReplyDelete
  2. Feel free to delete this comment later, but I couldn't figure out how else to get this message to you: something funky is going on with your twitter account (hacked?). Anyway... Cheers--

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for letting me know. Twitter froze my account and sent me an email to let me know I needed to change passwords to re-access. I have two accounts that are add-ons that access my TWitter. I know a ton of people use it- so that's pretty unlikely that those places are not legit, right? The two are the bitly.com and Klout. In any case, I changed my password on my blogger account, too. I bet the kids got into something odd this summer- whenever they are home for the summer we get a lot of viruses and Trojans on the computers they use.

      Delete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...