This is Not a Test

This is Not a Test wasn't quite what I expected. I was aware Sloane wasn't in the best state of mind, but I didn't expect it to last the entire book. I was kind of hoping she'd start to pull out of it at some point, but while she showed glimmers of hope, it never really happened.

While I didn't like Sloane and one of the other characters rubbed me wrong, I can appreciate the way Summers handled them. All the characters had very distinct personalities and I enjoyed watching the way they interacted as time went on. I really liked how Summers handled the subtle shifts in the group dynamic the longer they were stuck in close quarters together.

There's not really too much to say on the zombie front. They are a definite presence in the book, but there are only a few scenes in which they interact with our band of teens. I would have been down with more zombie scenes, but in the end, I didn't miss them all that much.

One more thing about Sloane: her stupidity almost hurt. I know her judgement was impaired by her mental state, but man, it was hard to read.

The Nutshell: In the end, I think I was a little let down by This is Not a Test simply because of all the hype. That, and Sloane is a bit of a downer. I'm glad I read it, though, and would probably suggest it to someone who enjoys contemporary and wants to dip their toes in the paranormal/horror genre.
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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.

This Is Not A Test is a book with zombies in it. But it’s not really about them, it’s about the fact that Sloane doesn’t want to live anymore and she can’t seem to find the right time to leave the world. The characters in this book were okay, they weren’t great because some of them seemed rushed and not well thought out and there wasn’t very much action. I liked the idea for this story and the chapters were short and mostly easy to read.

This is not a book about zombies (how they die, how they eat, how they kill, how they live, etc.), so if you are gonna read it because of that, you'll be disappointed.

This book is about a girl so dead inside that she wishes to join those dead outside.