Review Detail

Warning (and small spoiler): This Is Not a Test does not have a happy rainbows-and-butterflies ever after ending. That’s not what this books is about, and had Summers ended things in any other way than how she did, the entire story would have been ruined.

I, personally, thought the last few paragraphs of This Is Not a Test were brilliant.
Basically, this is a zombie book, but it’s not a gory-type zombie book.

Sloane Price is sitting at the breakfast table one morning with a suicide note in her pocket, and someone knocks on the door. That someone is a zombie; the entire neighborhood is swarmed by infected. Sloane and five other teens make it to the high school and they barricade themselves inside. And then they wait. For almost three weeks.

This Is Not a Test isn’t some edgy, fast-paced action novel; it’s more of a psychological thriller. Similarly to William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, Summers focuses a lot on human nature and survival, which is pretty fascinating. Sloane and the other kids do a lot of arguing, they wait around, they have desperate l’m-dying-anyway-so-who-cares sex, they hate each other.

I think the characters were one of the most interesting things about This Is Not a Test. I honestly didn’t like any of them. I didn’t even really like Sloane, the narrator. But I did root for them, and I didn’t want them to die. It wanted them to survive, and they wanted to survive.

This is a really smart book. Summers creates a gritty horror novel with raw emotion and realistic personalities. For me, it was a book I loved but also cringed at. Summers’s prose is fluid and effective, yet sparse, and her characterization is brutal yet realistic.

My favorite quote: “I hate her. I hate her so much my heart tries to crawl out of my throat but it gets stuck there and beats crazily in the too narrow space.

I’m not a zombie expert, but I’d be willing to be that there aren’t many books out there like This Is Not a Test. It’s a book very much focused on the internal struggle for survival and personal demons, rather than the outward fight. I, personally, thought it was brilliantly done and can’t help wishing this was part of a series of connected stand-alones.