This is Not a Test by Courtney Summers

This is Not a Test

by Courtney Summers

It's the end of the world. Six students have taken cover in Cortege High but shelter is little comfort when the dead outside won't stop pounding on the doors. One bite is all it takes to kill a person and bring them back as a monstrous version of their former self. To Sloane Price, that doesn't sound so bad. Six months ago, her world collapsed and since then, she's failed to find a reason to keep going. Now seems like the perfect time to give up. As Sloane eagerly waits for the barricades to fall, she's forced to witness the apocalypse through the eyes of five people who actually want to live. But as the days crawl by, the motivations for survival change in startling ways and soon the group's fate is determined less and less by what's happening outside and more and more by the unpredictable and violent bids for life - and death - inside. When everything is gone, what do you hold on to?

Reviewed by Nessa Luna on

3 of 5 stars

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I was surprised by this book. I had read some reviews that said that this book had zombies in them, which made me a bit reluctant to read them, but the reviews also said the story wasn’t about zombies. Sure enough, they were there, banging on the doors of the school the six kids were hiding in; attacking the two kids that dared to go outside, etc, but the zombies weren’t really the biggest problem (okay maybe a bit). The biggest problem had to do with the six kids that were trapped inside their old school.

I haven’t made a lot of notes with this book, because I was just so into it (I really liked it), so I don’t really have any reasons why I liked this book so much. It might have been because the characters all had problems of their own, Sloane was dealing with the fact that she actually wanted to die, Trace and Grace (twins, hence the names) were dealing with the fact that they had no idea whether their parents were still alive, and so on.

Of course, with a zombie apocalypse (with any apocalypse actually), people die, but one death in particular made me really really sad. I just wasn’t expecting it to happen like that, and I just wanted that person to be happy for the rest of their life, not die like this.

The thing I didn’t like so much, was the open ending. I really want to know what happened to the characters, if they made it to the place they were planning on going, what happened to the person that lead the zombies away from the other people, I just didn’t want the book to end like that. That’s why it got the score it has, because I hate open endings.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 7 September, 2013: Finished reading
  • 7 September, 2013: Reviewed