Review of Quarantine: The Loners by Lex Thomas

Title: Quaratine: The Loners
Series: Quarantine #1
Author: Lex Thomas (pen name for Lex Hrabe and Thomas Voorhies)
Published: 10 July 2012
Publisher: Egmont USA
Genre: YA, science fiction
Source: eARC from the publisher via NetGalley
Rating: 4/10

On the first day of school at McKinley High an explosion destroys the East Wing. All the adults suddenly vomit up their lungs and die. Soldiers surround the school and gun down any student who tries to escape. They seal off the building, trapping everyone inside. Over a month later it’s explained that the students are all infected with a virus that thrives only in the bodies of pubescent teenagers, making them instantly fatal to any child or adult they approach. Students will only be allowed to leave the school once they’ve passed through puberty and the virus leaves their bodies, in which case they have to get out quickly to avoid a swift and horrible death.

By this point the students have already divided into gangs based on American-style social cliques – Varsity (jocks), Pretty Ones, Geeks, Sluts, Nerds, Freaks and Skaters. Gangs protect their members and trade services and supplies. They also have a better chance of getting supplies when the students fight over the food drop that is delivered every two weeks. Life at McKinley is brutal, and it’s worse if you don’t have a gang, like David Thorpe and his younger brother Will. David used to be a popular jock but over the past few months he’s withdrawn from his social circle. He’s also made an enemy out of Sam Howard, the vengeful, violent leader of Varsity. David beat Sam up for stealing his girlfriend Hilary, so now Sam hates him. No gang is willing to protect David against the power of Varsity, so for over a year he concentrates on keeping his head down and doing what he must so that he and his brother can survive. But chaos erupts when David saves a beautiful girl from being raped, and accidently kills the Varsity member who attacks her.

Varsity will kill David if they get their hands on him, and to make things worse, Will is spiralling out of control. He’s in love with Lucy, the girl David rescued, but now Lucy is attracted to David instead, who likes her but is concerned about his brother’s feelings. Obsessed with trying prove himself, Will becomes increasingly deluded and reckless while David just tries his best to keep them alive.

I got off to a very bad start with this. The first few chapters rush by in a hurried attempt to set up the plot. Imagine highlighting the most significant scenes in a novel and taking out everything in between. One moment David is talking to a teacher, then there’s an explosion, the teacher dies, kids try to escape but are trapped in the school by soldiers. All this in two or three pages. In the next chapter it’s suddenly two weeks later, then a month, the gangs form, and they get told about the virus. The next chapter begins “One year later”. It’s like the authors (Lex Thomas is a pen name for Lex Hrabe and Thomas Voorhies) were so eager to get to the main story that they wanted to get all the preceding stuff out of the way as fast as fucking possible. I love a pacey plot, but this is ridiculous.

Once the main story (a love triangle, fighting brothers, Sam wanting to murder David) gets going, the novel slows down to a more reasonable pace, but it still lacks substance. The authors just don’t give us enough information. When the virus spread and the adults died, all the students’ hair fell out. When it grows back it’s white. Why? And why do none of the students wonder about this? Frankly, I think it’s just a contrivance that the authors used so that the gangs could dye their hair different colours using stuff like powdered cooldrink and ash.

I can accept that the military tells the students very little about the virus (although this looks like author laziness too), but why do they only communicate with them once? And only after a month? If they can provide food and other supplies, they can communicate with them, try to keep them organised and control all the violence. But they don’t. Why does no one mention what happened to the students’ families? Don’t the families want to communicate? And why the hell don’t any of the students wonder if they families are ok? David and Will conclude that their father must be ok because he was out of town when the virus spread, and that’s the last we hear on the subject.

Why don’t any of the gangs band together to take down Varsity, who takes most of the food? The gangs are so hostile to each other that inter-gang friendships or relationships are unthinkable. I’m quite willing to believe that there’d be a lot of violence in this situation, but would a bunch of teenagers really be this small-minded? Are they really so easily divided by stupid social categories? And given that the gangs take almost all the food, how do all the loners survive? Later in the novel the loners actually form a gang of almost a hundred students – where the fuck were they all hiding and how did they feed themselves?

I have a lot of questions about the gangs themselves too. How are the Freaks defined? There’s nothing particularly weird about them except that they dye their hair blue with toilet cleaner. What makes the Geeks geeky? They’re the art and drama students who put on plays, host a carnival, and are led by a flamboyantly gay boy. They’re more like hipsters. Varsity lives in the gym with the Pretty Ones and they all use the pool – how do they fill it and keep it clean? The Pretty Ones all wear white clothes, which is just ludicrous in that filthy environment. They also waste their time making pointless crap to sell, like lipstick and wigs. WHY?! It’s not like they need stuff to trade anyway – they survive by prostituting themselves to the Varsity boys. The Sluts on the other hand, aren’t even defined by promiscuity; they’re just a strong all-girl group. There are students having sex all the time, and although they apparently get condoms in the food drop, I can’t believe that no one would fall pregnant.

Seriously, the authors barely even tried to make this work. Last year I read Variant by Robison Wells, another novel about teenagers trapped in a school with no real adult supervision and a society made up of gangs. That was a different situation, as the kids lived organised lives and didn’t have to fight to survive or worry about being murdered, but they had no idea why they were imprisoned. However, I couldn’t help but compare Quarantine with Variant because the latter novel was meticulously detailed, explaining exactly how and why the school functioned the way it did, what the students thought of it, and how they coped. I wasn’t plagued by a long list of how’s and why’s because the author had obviously thought about them himself and made the effort to provide answers. As a result, Variant was way more interesting than this and the world-building did a lot to get me fully invested in the story. Lex Thomas seems to treat things like world-building as random crap that’s somehow getting in their way so it gets dealt with dismissively. There’s no saving the novel from this.

The story is actually ok but often frustrating. Will has epilepsy, and feels insecure after having a seizure on the quad and wetting his pants (notably, Will only has seizures when it suits the plot). He becomes obsessed with showing off and never helps David do laundry – a service that they trade for supplies. Will becomes a total asshole after David saves Lucy, and their love triangle becomes a key aspect of the plot. Will’s convinced his brother is some kind of fraud who is stealing his girl, so he frequently undermines him, or does something stupid and dangerous to impress Lucy. Meanwhile poor David shows him endless love and tolerance, and continues to provide for him. Lucy is stupidly manipulative, leading Will on when she wants David and getting close to both as if she has no idea what effect her body and beauty has on them. It makes you want to scream sometimes.

Sam’s vendetta against David is fairly compelling, if only because I had a grim determination to see what would happen. Can David turn The Loners into a strong gang? Will David survive long enough to ‘graduate’ and leave the school? Will Varsity tire of Sam’s murderous tendencies and turn on him? Sam is a very violent, vindictive person, the kind of bland villain who is so utterly horrible he doesn’t seem like a real person. Coupled with the whole gang arrangement, this makes for a great deal of brutality. There are gruesome murders, attempted murders, beatings, and terrible accidents. The Pretty Ones essentially trade in sex, with their leader, Hilary, arranging girlfriends for the Varsity boys. Lucy’s attempted rape is the only one on the page, but the implication is that rape must be fairly common; the authors just don’t address it. Varsity actually brews the own alcohol, and the guy who tried to rape Lucy was drunk at the time.

I don’t mind that this is sordid and bloody. It makes sense in the circumstances. The problem is that the circumstances are so implausible, the world-building so very shoddy. Quarantine: The Loners fails in so many ways and the story, while decent, isn’t nearly good enough to compensate. It actually ends on a cliffhanger that sets us up for a dystopian sequel, but no thanks, I’m done with this.

Still curious? Buy Quarantine: The Loners at The Book Depository.

Review of Variant by Robison Wells

Title: Variant
Author:  Robison Wells
Published: 4 October 2011
Publisher: HarperTeen, an imprint of HarperCollins
Genre: YA, mystery, thriller
Source: Review copy from publisher via NetGally
My Rating: 8/10

Benson Fisher has been in foster care since he was five, constantly changing schools and families, never staying long enough to make friends. At 17, he applies for a scholarship to the prestigious Maxfield Academy in the hope of a better life. But when Benson arrives at the school he learns that it’s a trap. Students are not allowed to leave or communicate with anyone on the outside. They’re watched constantly by cameras and bound by endless rules. There are no adults. They have classes but no homework.

The school’s services and maintenance are all taken care of by the students, who have organised themselves into gangs with specific outlooks and responsibilities. The most powerful gang, The Society, thinks the best way to deal with the school is to play by the rules. Havoc just wants to be powerful and menacing. Students who don’t agree with either of those groups and who still dream of escape can join the V’s – the Variants – which is where Benson naturally ends up.

It’s a volatile little society that’s held together by peer pressure and fear, and functions on rewards and punishments. Keep in line and you can earn comforts and luxuries. Break the rules and you suffer punishments like being starved for two days. The four most serious offences – trying to escape, violent fighting, refusing punishments or having sex – will get you sent to detention, which as far as anyone knows means death.

 

Normally, I’m averse to YA set in schools, preferring the more adventurous kind, but Maxfield Academy isn’t your average school and I loved this novel. Unlike some stories with a mystery, it doesn’t waste your time pretending that nothing’s wrong, even though you already know what’s wrong because you read about it in the blurb. There’s no point in making Benson think he’s in a normal school, so as soon as he arrives there’s a student to explain everything to him. Benson is as appalled by this as anyone should be, and isn’t shy about voicing his views – the school is a prison, everyone is insane for pretending that things are normal, and he’s going to get the hell out.

Benson is actually the main reason I enjoyed this book so much. He’s an excellent character, not because of who he is as a person, but because of the function he serves as a narrator, as the perspective from which you experience the story. As a person, Benson is an all-round good guy – smart, easy to like, adaptable – but not interesting enough to be a great character based on personality alone. Quite frankly, I don’t really identify with him, even though I admire him. He’s a much more mature person than I was at 17, thinking very carefully and systematically about the mystery of the school and how he can escape. He’s also much more of a rebel than most teenagers. Yes, teenagers are known for being rebellious, but that’s usually only when it comes flouting the wishes of their parents and teachers. When it comes to their peers, they tend to bow to convention in a desperate attempt to be normal. Benson is under constant pressure from the other Maxfield students to just accept the fact that they’re trapped in this crazy school. Peer pressure has had a taming effect on all the students, but Benson is unique in his persistence, as the title implies.

You might argue that this makes him unusually bold for a teenager, but I think it works perfectly for the reader. I enjoy the experience of reading characters who are as brave as I would like to be, who take the courses of action that I want them to take, who feel and think as I do. For most of the novel, I felt perfectly in tune with Benson. He was outspoken enough that I saluted his honesty, but not so much that I thought he was taking it too far. His inner monologues echoed my own thoughts about the school and the students. When he considered possible theories about the purpose of the school, he never seemed to be missing the obvious or important factors, as characters often do in these situations, when authors are trying to drag out the tension. Instead, Benson makes lots of reasonable guesses, but he’s smart enough to doubt himself and keep in mind that he might be wrong. Despite his intelligence and determination he’s not flawless, but in his moments of error or weakness, my reaction was one of understanding, not frustration. Because he’d always been an outsider, I felt happy for him when he started to make friends and got caught up in a sweet adolescent romance, but also concerned about his clashes with more hostile students. The emotional connections he made were mirrored by my own increasing emotional connections to the story.

Essentially, Benson was the ideal narrator, because he perfectly satisfied my curiosity as a reader, but is also a sympathetic and likeable. It helps that Wells has written a unique mystery too. If he had used a more conventional plot, I would have been able to guess what was happening simply because I was familiar with the stereotypes, and I would have been bored and frustrated while I waited for Benson to figure out what I already knew. But luckily Wells had me wonderfully, totally stumped. I never managed to guess exactly what the truth was and thus Benson and I were – pardon the pun – always on the same page. I felt just as invested in the mystery and desperation as he was.

I particularly appreciated the very serious conflicts Benson has to face. He’s often persuaded or forced to reconsider his goal of escaping. The punishment for trying to escape is detention, but since no one ever returns from the detention room and the students often find blood in there, it’s assumed that detention is death. Benson believes that the school can only be defeated if the students all rise up against it, but to convince them to rebel would also be to convince them to risk their lives for his ideas. Isaiah, leader of The Society, goes so far as to call Benson selfish – if they all tried to escape, some people would undoubtedly be killed in the attempt, but Benson assumes he will be one of the survivors so he’s willing to let others die. Isaiah makes a good point, but it’s a difficult one to accept when you know that the school is wrong and feel rebellion is right.

And if they did escape, what then? The school specifically chose teenagers without friends or family – teenagers who wouldn’t be missed and have nowhere to go. At Maxfield they have friends, good food, and a comfortable place to sleep. No one denies that they’re basically being held prisoner, but it’s better and less frightening than the alternative. One student tells Benson that she used to be homeless. Even Benson himself has to admit that Maxfield’s facilities are far better than the crappy schools he’s been to, and as he finds friends and a potential girlfriend, he has to ask himself if he really wants to risk it all by starting a rebellion or escaping.

He’s actually on the verge of giving in, I think, when he stumbles across one of the school’s secrets, renewing his determination to find the truth and escape from the school. Wells’s storytelling is smooth and efficient here. Before this point, the story was driven by Benson learning about the school and raging against it, getting to know the students and bonding with some of them, and some paintball fights for a bit of action (the school makes the gangs play against each other). Just as things start to settle, you reach this explosive turning point that gives the plot fresh momentum. I finished the novel in a very tense binge-read, completely caught up in the urgency and the action spawned by Benson’s knowledge and what he decides to do with it. The story gets a tad brutal, but it felt right.

Variant ends on a fantastic, dizzying cliffhanger that seals the book’s excellence, if it was ever in doubt. The current YA market seems a bit stale at the moment, with many authors and publishers shamelessly milking the bestselling clichés for all they’re worth. I was so relieved and happy then, to find that Variant doesn’t bother with any of that crap and is that much more thrilling as a result. I was pleased to learn that Publisher’s Weekly named it one of the best books of 2011.

Unfortunately the ending also leaves you with as many questions as answers, to the extent that, after pausing for breath, I would have picked up the sequel before even getting off my chair. But the sequel – Feedback – has yet to be written. According to the author’s blog, he’s  been diagnosed with severe panic disorder that’s already cost him his day job, and the medication he’s taking makes it difficult for him to write. However, he’s said that things are slowly improving, and I can only hope that it continues to do so because he has something great to offer the YA genre.

Buy a copy of Variant at The Book Depository