[This is a review I wrote last year and have been holding aside for a time I needed a quick review. Well that time has arrived. I don't intend to leave reviews so long between writing them and posting them.]
Pros: interesting characters
Cons: disastrous events all happen the same night, first person narrative sometimes switched to third for effect
Lt Col Sargent Whitemore, USMC (retired), has a plan to save 100 children of the rich and famous from the imminent end times. He's built an inaccessible fortress out of an old monastery on a mountainous island.
He will be their only contact with the outside world. All their drugs, make-up, sex and video games are gone.
The kids are not happy being sent here. And the adults on staff are damaged people, running away from their pasts.
Sarge's plan is working great, until one night when everything suddenly goes very, very wrong.
I read this book expecting a modern dystopian fiction and instead got a Jurassic Park style 'everything bad that could happen all happens at the same time and society collapses' novel with a Lord of the Flies ending. While I could have accepted that things in a closed community would go wrong one by one, it seemed far fetched for several disparate events to happen the same night, creating a meltdown. And while I could understand the mentality behind the post crisis actions, given that he knew things were falling apart, I was surprised by how little Sarge did to try to stop the meltdown.
While the book had an interesting cast, impossible events and a cop out ending made this a disappointing book.
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