Krishna
One of those twisted games where ‘You follow my rules or everybody dies’ kind of book. But it has some surprises buried in it that wakes you up in a hurry!
Initially, I was terribly bored to see teenage issues and angst and plotting but the book does perk up and repays your persistence.
Amber is invited to a celebratory dinner with five other scholarship recipients, as she has won the Brewster Town Hall Scholarship.
Amber has issues with Robbie, her boyfriend who is not nice to her and has a crush with Diego, the valedictorian on whom she has a crush. Both are also invited to the dinner!
Robbie picks her up. He has been asking her to follow him to George Tech and convinces her to apply there. Her heart is set on learning music and when she hears back from George Tech that she has been accepted, she lies to Robbie that she has not heard back. She cannot give up her music dreams and cannot tell Robbie straight either.
There are six people and six tables are set. The host – the mayor – never arrives. They are freaked out to find that the front door is locked and they cannot open it, as well as the fact that there was no table set for the mayor and that the food was already there, ready to be consumed.
There is an envelope and a bomb ticking. There is a botulism poison in syringe (which can kill a person if injected). The envelope says ‘You should choose one person to die in an hour or else all of you die’.
OK, can you be more childish than that? No not the plot alone but the telling of it is juvenile, as if it is meant for ten year old girls.
A year earlier, Amber had to crawl to beg a favour from Sasha Harris whom she hated. That is to give her an opportunity to compose music to the school play. There she meets Robbie who seems to be interested in her. All this is pretty ‘young adult’ vibe – without the interesting pieces like some others. Priya wants to cheerlead (Priya is her best friend… yawn!)
She gets her way – Sasha is agreeable and her will overshadows other objections. She asks Amber to come to the party given that weekend with booze. So Priya and Amber steal Amber’s parent’s booze and go to the party. (Another yawn.)
The group of youngsters sit and argue for page after page as to whether the threat is real. Realistic discussion? Yes. But do you want to read endless circular argument in a novel of this sort? Hell, no!
The past flashback takes you to another ho hum place where they smuggle booze into the library for an illegal party and get found out by the library director.
They find a camera and know that the threat could be real. Now, each one has a secret. (Oh come on, you think. How lame can a story be?). Amber is hated by Phil because she ratted out that he had a gun in his backpack, even though later she found out that it was not to harm anyone. (Huh? Come again?). It is all teenage talk crap with power girl Sasha lording it over all and so on. Yawn after yawn.
And on and on it goes. The author imagines she is revealing secrets of each one and it is all ho hum. So and so hates you because you were friends with her and ditched her for Sasha. So and so was framed by you but he was innocent. Now is this the person plotting to kill us all? So excruciatingly obvious that you want to stop reading and sleep a bit to recover from the fatigue of reading.
And it goes on in this vein, trivial details after trivial details. Everyone has a ‘secret’ that does not matter at all (drug use, cheating, weed smoking etc) and they all have petty jealousies. What is more, none of this is even relevant to the main story and you just get more and more irritated as you read on.
We are presented with grudges. Diego’s father ruined Amber’s father’s business by quitting from which they never recovered. Sasha was being a mean bitch to Priya but when Amber tried to intervene, she seemed to snap Amber’s head off (metaphorically of course). Again, all teeny girly stuff and does not satisfy you if you are a serious reader and want some depth in the story. Even the writing style seems to be very casual, the arguments are inane, the problems trivial and this bunch of schoolkids remember trivia in trying to find out who set them up in the locked up room. Yawn!
A camera is discovered peeking into the room. They try to defuse the bomb by stacking it up the chimney rather than ‘killing one person per hour’ as the instructions dictated. But not without a whole lot of frustrated shouting that does not seem to have any substance at all.
Now, all of Sasha’s evil deeds come tumbling out. There are some really nasty shocks and twists in the story that come as a complete surprise. So this is not such a dumb book after all. Still the build up is a lot of ho hum.
The person who arranged the set up is a huge surprise and also, the fact that it went a bit out of control is another surprise.
This kind of elevates the book up a couple of levels and does not make you think that it was a complete waste of time.
I still cannot say this is a great novel but at least there are some good twists that no one expected.
5/10
— Krishna