This Is Not a Test [Paperback]

I was so-so about This is Not a Test when I read the description in the Vine program. I love zombies, but could do without the suicidal girl dealing with wanting to die, and being around people who want to live. Turns out this was so much more.

Sloane's father beat her and her sister. Methodically and aggressively. Lily (older sister) and Sloane talk about leaving. They save money, they dream of a home without their father, and more importantly... with each other. Sloane's world comes crashing down when she wakes one day to find a note from Lilly 'I'm sorry I can't do this anymore', and Lily gone. She wants to die now but doesn't know how, Lily took her sleeping pills with her and Sloane can't cut herself. It seems though that the apocalypse tears apart broken homes as well as happy ones. Zombies start rising and Slone's world continues to crash.

Fast forward a week later and Sloane is in the company of other teens who are hiding out in their high school. The zombies are relentless and tempers come to a boil. Sloane just wants to die though, maybe heroically, maybe quietly, but she has wanted to die since she read Lily's note. But the other teens are survivors and Sloane finds herself being pulled along, until she starts quietly caring for someone else... another boy Rhys.

Tragedy strikes the group again and again, and the author throws twists at readers mercilessly. Good people who do bad things. Good people who sacrifice one person for the group, wimpy people who die saving others, the list goes on and on, until the readers are left contemplating human nature and the necessity of evil.

The end of the book left me feeling like I did when I finished The Forest of Hands and Teeth... at the end of the journey is this it? Was the cost worth the sacrifices? What's left?

You know those books where you crack them open promising yourself that you'll just read one chapter, maybe two because you have important things to do and it's late to be starting a new book? Well, my good intentions flew out the window after I started this book. Here's a brief rundown of all the ways I slacked off so that I could read this book;

1. I promised to read just 'one more chapter' at 5pm, then I'd start on dinner. Reality: Two hours later, I slapped some hot dogs and buns together, threw mustard and relish on the table and then ducked behind my book again to find out how Sloane and the others ended up at the school.

2. I promised to finish the laundry, it was washed and dry but sitting in baskets waiting to be folded and put away. Reality: The survivors play a drinking game called I Never and reveal more than they intended and I cannot put the book down! It's after 10:30, way too late to start on that big a project, besides, everyone has something clean to wear tomorrow, yes, people really do wear bermuda shorts and sweaters in April, trendsetter!

3. I promised to finish cleaning up the basement bedroom for visitors. Reality: It's two minutes after midnight, technically tomorrow and someone is in the school with them, someone skulking around and hiding! So I'll just schedule it for early in the morning, I'm really a morning person anyways (okay, that isn't true at all, but I like to think someday I will be).

4. I will turn off the light and go to sleep by 1 am. Reality: I don't know what time I fell asleep, it was sometime after they found the window in the basement and what was stacked in front of it, outside the sky had just begun to lighten and I heard the neighbor warming up his motorcycle, he likes to do this at random times in the morning, usually starting at 5:30 and ending by 7:00, so anytime around sunrise is my guess.

I'm not going to go into the story details, the synopsis pretty much tells you everything you need to know. This isn't a story about gossipy mean girls getting eaten by zombies, somehow, I was afraid that would be the plot or about birds flying or getting saved by heartstoppingly beautiful boys, the main character Sloane isn't easy to like, she's a wallower and the person she most needs to be saved from is herself. I don't mean that in a negative way, she has her reasons and this recent spate of zombies shakes her already broken world, but perhaps it's her depressive nature that makes it easiest on her to survive, she doesn't expect much out of life and hers was already pretty nightmareish.

Well, I'm done with the book now, the ending really left me feeling kinda broken and hopeless, I wont say anymore, my mind is a little fuzzy now since I'm running on caffeine and milk duds, just read this book.

Also appears on The Screaming Nitpicker.

"Maybe the only way our story can end is varying degrees of sad. And that I miss her, and that I need her, and this kind of missing, this kind of need, the kind of emptiness it leaves behind is worse than waking up one day finding the whole world has collapsed in on itself, that I was over long before it was." (ARC p. 226)

Zombies? Usually, I'm not interested. The zombie fanatic of the family is my brother. Still, something about This is Not a Test intrigued me. The good word friends put behind this author and this book in particular? The way I swear I saw someone describe it as a more depressing The Breakfast Club in the middle of a zombie apocalypse? Whatever it was, I snatched it up and started the novel with a sense of caution.

Unless you really can't stand zombie books, go pre-order or buy this now. Do it. Less a story about the zombie apocalypse (though we do get some good zombie scenes in there, especially toward the end) and more about a group of hurt people doing what they have to and being forced to deal with their own problem while doing so, This is Not a Test took me by surprise.

Characterization is the novel's strongest suit. Sloane's well-painted struggles with her sister's abandonment of her to their father's ways create a brilliant character. All of the teenagers except perhaps one of them are given the same treatment as Sloane and do some pretty despicable things over the course of the novel. Some of them turn other people into sacrifices; some of them have to become murderers. They're trying to survive long enough to see the next day, not be good people. But they're still just teenagers. They're just children without parents forced to find a way to make it through the zombie epidemic that's suddenly taking over the world.

More than it's about killing zombies (but there is some zombie-killing, especially toward the climactic scenes), it's about these broken people trying to pull themselves back together. Wanting, angry, hurt people who need a reason to keep going and not toss themselves to the ragged-breathed hordes outside the high school just waiting for their next meal.

Partway through This is Not a Test, I had a revelation: This is it. What Summers can do is exactly what I want to be able to do as a writer when I try to focus on the less noble emotions of my characters. She channels these desperate, damaged characters so well and makes them feel so alive even when they themselves feel like they're the walking dead (the kind that don't want to eat human flesh yet). I want to capture the hopelessness of a hellish situation you can't escape the way Summers did. When my characters feel like there's nothing left for them, I want them to be as authentically wretched as Sloane and co. are after everything concerning Mr. Baxter.

The only problem I had with the novel was that its writing style was often off-putting. Perhaps this will be fixed because I had an ARC, but the long, rambling run-on sentences nearly drove me up the wall. Their meandering structure made it hard to keep the picture in my head moving the way it should. When they mixed with short fragments--oh God, the pain. Toward the end, I stopped caring because it ended up working so well.

Just over halfway through the novel, I was feeling so good about this novel that I added Courtney Summers's entire backlist of novels to my to-read list. An author with this great of a handle on the darker human emotions and characterization (and who can also make me shamelessly jump up and down with the book in my hands in the middle of a high school) is one I need to keep an eye on.

""I wouldn't have let you die. When I saw them coming for you, I ran to you, to save you," I say. "I wouldn't have left you like that. Not like she did to me." I swallow hard. "She always said I'd die without her and she left anyway."

""But you didn't die," he says.

""I did," I say. "I'm just waiting for the rest of me to catch up."" (ARC p. 226)

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