Book Review: What Happens Next by Colleen Clayton

Before the ski trip, sixteen-year-old Cassidy “Sid” Murphy was a cheerleader (at the bottom of the pyramid, but still…), a straight-A student, and a member of a solid trio of best friends. When she ends up on a ski lift next to handsome local college boy, Dax Windsor, she’s thrilled; but Dax takes everything from Sid—including a lock of her perfect red curls—and she can’t remember any of it.

Back home and unable to relate to her old friends, Sid drops her college prep classes and takes up residence in the A/V room with only Corey Livingston for company. But as she gets to know Corey (slacker, baker, total dreamboat), Sid finds someone who truly makes her happy. Now, if she can just shake the nightmares and those few extra pounds, everything will be perfect… or so she thinks.

What happens when you think something terrible has occurred, but you can’t be sure? What happens when you can’t remember? What happens when you can’t forget?

What happens when someone takes everything from you?

This book doesn’t have all the answers, but it sure does come close.

Sid felt so incredibly real – her reactions, her motivations, her skewed understandings all made sense the way that Sid thought and felt them. They made sense to her (most of the time), and so it was easy to see why she did(n’t) do what she did.

I found the first part of the book utterly harrowing. As Sid slowly came to realise what had happened to her, I literally had to take breaks from reading: tear myself away from the words on the page and take a deep breath. It has that much of an impact.

Book Review: This is Not a Test by Courtney Summers

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?

Six words to describe This is Not a Test by Courtney Summers: powerful, suspenseful, horrifying, unexpected, heart-rending, real.

I didn’t expect to like this novel. I’m not a big fan of anything zombie and I feel terror at the mere mention of the horror genre. This book, though, was something totally different, something completely unexpected. And probably not for fans of pure zombie-inspired tales of horror!

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it, though! This is Not a Test is a wonderfully constructed novel. The characters are purely three-dimensional – they each have their strengths and an abundance of weaknesses that serve to make the novel all the more interesting, and all the harder to put down.