(117)This Is Not A Test by Courtney Summers

This Is Not A Test

by Courtney Summers

@courtney_s

Publication Date: June 19, 2012

Pages: 336

Buy it Here!

It is hard for me to write a review about a book full of zombies.  Last night (yes, this is a post dated review) as I was in bed, reading this book a lunatic was one state over shooting nearly seventy people and shattering the security of our entire nation.  It just doesn't seem right to me for some reason.  So -  I am going to set the "publish date" post for sometime in the future and I will come back and finish this post when the horror story of last night is not quite so fresh


So here we are a month after the horrific shootings in Colorado.  As unbelievable as it seems, there was another deadly shooting that rocked the nation, this time in Wisconsin.  The images and stories are still fresh, but life must go on.

This Is Not A Test is set in the not too distant future. Television and radio station programming has been replaced by the Emergency Broadcast System broadcasting dire warnings prefaced with "This Is Not A Test" - Sloane and a few other teenagers are on their way to the community shelter when they are over run by Zombies and take shelter in their recently abandoned high school. Sloane has always been a bit of an outcast and she still is after "the shit hits the fan" - the thought of being trapped in the high school with kids who are not her friends is almost as painful as being abandoned by her best friend, and sister.  Will she be able to get past those feelings in order to survive?  Or is she just going to give up and let the zombies end her pain?

I have seen some critics compare This Is Not A Test to The Breakfast Club. And they aren't too far off the mark.  But I would say it is more like The Breakfast Club meets The Walking Dead. The body count is high, but I would expect nothing less from a zombie story.

Bottom line, reading is all about escaping reality. Nothing could be further from reality than a tale about zombies.  After what has been happening in our country recently, the high body count makes it a bit of a tough read, but for some people that is exactly the kind of escapism they seek.  Give it a read and let me know what you think!