Book Review- This Is Not a Test

I finished reading This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers last night for an Around the World ARC Tour.

From Goodreads:

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?

When I first saw that there was going to be a zombie book written by an author who I usually thought wrote contemporary books, I jumped right on to wanting to read it.  Unfortunately, it didn't do much for me.

I'm left with feeling like there were things missing from the story.  Sloane is in her house with her father, who abuses her, and she's scared of him, then all of a sudden there's a zombie through her window.  It's never explained if this is the first that Sloane has heard of zombies, or if zombies were starting to become common.  And it's never explained how this zombie-ness came to be.  Then at the end, the book just kind of stops.  It's not like there was a cliffhanger where you were left wanting more.  It just seemed to end.

Then there's the characters.  I felt bad for Sloane because of her home life.  I really did.  But I didn't really like her for some reason.  I didn't really feel that she had any redeeming qualities, which is hard for me to say about someone.  Then you had the other students trapped in the high school.  Cary and Rhys were pretty okay guys.  But Harrington, sorry to say it but he just seemed like a baby.  I get that he's young, but the way he was portrayed made him seem like he was 8, not 15.  Then there were the twins--Trace was just a first class jerk for most of the book.  The only time he was decent was when it came to his sister.  I liked Grace.  She seemed like a nice girl. 

And the plot.  When I think of the book on the whole, I think it's more boring where they just sit around a lot because they're trapped and there's not a lot of action.  And I usually like more character books.  But this one wasn't such a great example.  But then I think back to parts of the story and there was action parts here and there.  They just don't stick out when I think of the whole.

So yeah, reading my review back it sounds like I hated the book.  Which I didn't.  I just didn't care about it, plain and simple.  I'm indifferent.

I gave this book a rating of 3/5.

This Is Not a Test will be released on June 19, 2012.

This book fulfills items in the following challenges:
2012 Reading Challenge 150+: 47
2012 ARC Reading Challenge: 40
2012 Young Adult Reading Challenge: 44

*FTC Disclosure: I was given this book for free for an honest review as part of the Around the World Tours.