#YABookReview: 'Panic' by Lauren Oliver

I received an advance reader's edition of Panic at no cost through the Amazon Vine program. I received no other compensation for this review, which represents my own honest opinion.

Panic is a contemporary young adult novel with a realistic plot and characters. It takes place in the small town of Carp, New York. The high school seniors in Carp play a game over the summer called Panic; the winner takes a pot of somewhere around $50,000. To many in the economically depressed town, the money represents the only chance they'll ever have to live better lives than their parents. 

The novel is written in the third person, but chapters are divided into Heather and Dodge chapters, depending on which of the two main characters they follow. Heather Nill lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic, drug-addicted mother and her younger sister Lily. She has no plans for her life beyond high school. She dreams of leaving Carp, but she can't stand the thought of leaving Lily behind. And yes, Heather is aware that her last name literally means "nothing."

Dodge Mason comes from a similar background. He never knew his father, a Dominican roofer. His lighter-complexioned half sister Dayna played Panic when she was a senior, and in the final round she was in a car accident and lost the use of her legs. Their mom can't afford the most advanced medical treatment for her, so chances are she'll never walk again.

Dayna had been competing against Luke Hanahran when she was injured. When it's Dodge's turn to compete, Luke's brother Ray is also a contestant in Panic. Dodge intends to get revenge for Dayna - that's his main motivation for playing the game.

Along with Dodge and Heather, Heather's best friend Natalie (Nat) Velez is a competitor. Nat doesn't have a very strong stomach for dangerous activities, but she wants to win the money to further her dream of being an actress in L.A.

Panic is kept secret from the town's adults, with ever-changing rules, locations, and judges. None of the players know who the judges are.

I've been wanting to read the first book in Lauren Oliver's Delirium trilogy, which is also called Delirium, for quite a while now. After reading Panic, I'm not so sure I want to read it anymore. I just haven't fallen in love with Oliver's writing the way I have, say, Veronica Roth's. I thought Panic was interesting, but not great. There are moments of mild suspense when the characters seem to be in great danger, but very few consequences actually happen to the four main characters. The suspense is kind of a tease.

I hoped this would be more of a "what if real kids had their own version of The Hunger Games" kind of thing, but it was even more realistic than even that - which I didn't love. I knew going into this reading that it wasn't any kind of dystopian or fantasy novel, but it turns out I simply like the speculative genres of young adult books more than the more realistic kind.

This is the second stand-alone Lauren Oliver book I've read. The first was her middle grade fantasy novel The Spindlers. I thought that was just okay, too.

But if you like realistic YA fiction about what kind of trouble bored kids with very little to lose could get into, you may very well enjoy this book.

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Shift by Madison Dunn. $8.99 from Smashwords.com
I'm not sure why it happens, but when I focus just right, I can slow time. Things around me become lighter somehow, and I almost feel the tiny particles of energy spinning inside of them. The thing is, having the ability to transform the world around you isn't all it's cracked up to be -- especially when you are running from the Valencia without any deodorant.

SOC Sunday + Writing Update + A Review of 'The Spindlers' by Lauren Oliver

This Stream of Consciousness Sunday's theme is "Pass It On:" what have we passed down to our children and what our parents have passed down to us. Jana wrote about the fear of the dentist she passed down to her youngster. I have the dental anxiety from my own bad dental experience as a 20-year-old, but my anxiety in general is a gift of dubious value from my mom, and she got it from her mom.

I'm nervous a lot. Ask my husband - it drives him crazy. I'm always imagining worst-case scenarios, and it's hard to be happy when you're always anticipating something bad being around the corner. I haven't been happy very much lately - more like just muddling through. It may have something to do with the fact that the prescription I get for my terrible PMS (I would say full-blown PMDD) ran out a little while ago and I haven't refilled it yet. It does seem to make me a slightly happier person at all times of the month.

Right now, things that are hard to tolerate are REALLY hard to tolerate.

Which brings me to a writing update. The husband/co-writer and I are putting the finishing touches on the third book in the Pagan Spirits novel series. Back in July of 2012 (that's how long it's been since I worked on this book), we wrote a really nice romantic scene that takes place at a fairy-haunted graveyard in Scotland, where Zen and Ramesh have gone for their honeymoon.

Not the final draft of the artwork, but it gives you some idea.

We wrote it on our old laptop. Said laptop is now a dead brick. The vast majority of the novel was saved elsewhere, but that one little scene that made the honeymoon chapter so much more interesting and romantic is now just a memory.

I have to rewrite it - and I HATE having to rewrite a lost scene. I know it'll never be as good as the lost one. I have had more than my fair share of anxiety and frustration (mostly frustration!!) over that stupid missing scene. I am not looking forward to the rewrite at all. We attempted to work on it today, but our collaboration devolved into an argument. It's been set aside for a few days until we can work on it without all the high drama and heartbreak.

If you're not a writer, you might not have any idea how hard it is to get your thoughts to cooperate with the scene you intend to write, and how precious the draft is once it's been written. Writing something that reads smoothly and sounds professional is nowhere near is easy as it seems.

But, God willin' and the creek don't rise, we'll have St. James's Day (Pagan Spirits Book Three) back from the proofreader's soon and ready for a late spring debut. I may be just a little burnt out at the moment, especially with erotica and writing sex scenes. I have been doing it since 2006, after all. Maybe I should try writing a children's book for a change of pace.

Which brings us to part 3 of the blog post: a review of The Spindlers by Lauren Oliver


The Spindlers by Lauren Oliver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lauren Oliver is famous for her books for slightly older readers, particularly Delirium and Pandemonium. There are too many good YA series for me to keep up with these days, so I haven't read those, but I picked up The Spindlers because it was a stand-alone book available for free from Amazon Vine.

The back cover of my ARC compares it to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass and Coraline, but there's really only one scene near the end that really reminded me of Coraline. (For the record, I have only seen the movie of Coraline. I did not read the book.)

It's a fairly dark story, in some ways akin to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, if that couple were a brother and sister and the sister had to go to the Underworld (here simply called Below) to rescue the brother. Like Alice, Liza is a sensible, level-headed girl who finds herself on an adventure with talking animals, strange creatures and homicidal queen. Like Alice, she finds herself equal to the challenge - even when confronted, like Harry Potter, with a 3-headed dog.

Reading this, I had neither the sense that I was reading a wholly derivative retold Greek myth nor the sense that I was reading something wholly original - it falls somewhere in the middle. It touches on the issues of trust, friendship, honesty, the value of siblinghood and how children should treat their parents, but it's not overly didactic. I probably would have enjoyed this as a bedtime story when I was a middle-grade reader.

View all my reviews on GoodReads

Pagan Spirits novels:

Beltane (Book 1)

Midsummer Night (Book 2)