Book Review | This Is Not A Test | Courtney Summers

Jul 26

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Book Review | This Is Not A Test | Courtney Summers

This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers
Series: This Is Not a Test #1
Published by St. Martin's Griffin on June 19, 2012
Genres: Contemporary YA, Horror & Ghost Stories, Young Adult, Zombies
Pages: 326
Format: eARC
Source: the publisher via NetGalley
Amazon • Barnes & Noble • Goodreads
four-stars

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?

So. ZOMBIES. I’m not usually in the zombie fan club, friends. I’m not sure I could tell you why aside from the fact that the one thing that bothers me the most is gore. I can handle suspense, I can handle being scared, I can handle being mentally screwed with. But something starts gushing blood and flinging brains all over the place? Nuh uh. No thank you. I always think of zombies as gory, but Courtney Summers’ THIS IS NOT A TEST basically showed me why that’s narrow thinking, and proved to me that I haven’t been giving zombie books enough credit for being AWESOME. Still not my super-favorite thing, but that’s certainly not the fault of THIS IS NOT A TEST.

This was a good book for me to read as my first zombie-pocalypse book because yeah, there were zombies who feasted on human flesh in it. (Yuck.) But it was really about more than that, I thought. At the same time, though, there’s nothing feel-good about zombies, guys, and even though I really, REALLY enjoyed THIS IS NOT A TEST, I’m not sure how many more zombie books I can handle. I CAN tell you that I’m so glad that I read this one. It was intense, sad, bleak, and pretty much unputdownable.

Obviously, the bleak, intense parts have to do with the constant fear and suspense that Sloane and the other kids are living with while they’re trapped in their high school waiting for help and saving that increasingly looks unlikely. As much as Courtney Summers has made THIS IS NOT A TEST about the people and the way they interact with each other and turn on each other, she never lets us forget the EFFING ZOMBIES trying to bust down the doors and get their feast on. Reading it made me jumpy and got me all wound up and panicky. Just from the hopelessness of listening to the emergency warning playing over and over again, and the random reminders of zombies pounding on the doors. It was suspenseful and fantastic.

But THIS IS NOT A TEST is sad, too. Of course, people die, and it’s pretty terrible. Sloane, the main character, is a sad young girl too, who was contemplating suicide before the zombie apocalypse after her older sister left her alone with their abusive father. Her contemplation becomes a desire pretty quickly, and Sloane spends a good deal of time trying to find ways to get herself killed without risking the lives of anyone else. It’s intense and a pretty legit downer. It wasn’t until after I was finished with THIS IS NOT A TEST that I realized Courtney Summers wrote a book ostensibly about the undead to tell the story of a girl who wishes she WAS dead and gradually comes to realize that maybe she wants the opposite. I KNOW. A zombie book about LIFE. Go figure.

Maybe that seems like a stretch to you, but that’s what I got from it in a really big picture kind of way. But truly, all of the characters, not just Sloane, are trying to save themselves, or find their way to safety without getting bitten, so seeing things through that lens was basically my way of pointing out the silver lining to myself. And the thing with all the characters in THIS IS NOT A TEST is, even when they do devastating, unlikable things and you hate them for the act itself, if you take a step back and realize that these kids are barely surviving THE EFFING ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE and have lost loved ones and are living in fear and were a little effed up BEFORE the zombies came, well, their actions have context. They’re just trying to survive, y’all.

I will say that the end seemed super fast to me. Sometimes in a gripping, “Holy shit I can’t believe this is happening!” kind of way, which is great. But sometimes it felt like, “Holy shit did that just happen in, like, two seconds?” kind of way, which wasn’t as great. There are a few overarching pieces of the story that culminate in the last two chapters with a speed that makes their resolution seem rushed, and I wished they had some more meat on them. There was certainly lots of adrenaline, though.

THIS IS NOT A TEST by Courtney Summers was really the perfect book for me to read as an introduction to zombies, guys, because I found it to be more about the drama and the suspense than the actual zombies attacking all the time. I mean, I’m not going to be devouring all the zombie books–they’re still just a touch too dark to be something I look to read all the time–but I can appreciate the life and death jeopardy, and I can CERTAINLY appreciate Courtney Summers’ super writing. This won’t be the last book of hers I read, nor will it be the only zombie book I read. That last bit is something I never thought I’d say, so I hope you all take it for the big recommendation that it is. THIS IS NOT A TEST is pretty amazing.