This Is Not a Test

This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What an outstanding.... odd book.

To be honest, I'm not even sure how to rate it.

On the one hand, I just want to praise it, recommend it, tell you it's amazing and give it 5 stars.

On the other hand, the aspect I didn't like is so macroscopic that I can't give it what it theoretically deserves.

This is the first book by Courtney Summers that I have read but rest assured I will soon get my hands on her other ones - one I actually already own, Cracked up to be. There's something really powerful in Summers' writing style that will suck you in the story and make you feel just like she wants you to feel.

This is not a test is basically a story about a profoundly damaged girl, victim of domestic abuse, who gets stuck inside a school with a bunch of other guys, struggling for their survival.

The story per se, what led them there, the circumstances, are secondary and relatively important, as the real focus is on Sloane's internal turmoil, on the ghosts that haunt her from the past and on the tenuous and casual balance among the people who are stuck inside the school.

A sense of desperation, of oppression and of uneasiness bleeds from the pages of this book in a way I really can't help but admire. Summers is a masterful story-teller and the way she lets us, gradually, into the characters' psyche is something you don't often encounter in even skilled writers nowadays. Each single character of This is not a test steps out of the pages and comes alive in front of your eyes, 100% believable and true, stripped of false moralism or clichéd genre taboo, painfully authentic.

I could not, in all honesty, condemn or praise a character at any given moment in the story, their actions being far from predictable and absolutely not meant to make me either cheer or despise them.

So why are there zombies in it, you might ask?

Good question, I'm still wondering too.

The zombies are the reason I can't give this book 5 stars. I'm not sure if they were meant to give a gory, dark edge to the story - which truly is dark enough in itself - or if they were the excuse to justify the isolation of these kids in a confined space, waiting for the world to end or for someone to come save them, but they felt as a mere plot device to me. We just know that, at a given time in history, zombies appeared, no background. True, zombie invasion was not the fulcrum of the story, but the fact that I kept wondering what had happened and what the heck was going on with the outside world left me partly unsatisfied.

Still, an amazingly well-written story you certainly do not want to miss, whether you're a zombie lover or not.