By Quentin Monasterial
Courier Staff Reporter/Columnist
With her novel This is Not a Test, Courtney Summers, an author that primarily writes contemporary novels for Young Adults, has steered into ‘sinister’ territory. This is an arguable statement, considering that her contemporary works feature equally sinister issues.
In This is Not a Test, Summers transports us into a world that has zombies beginning to overrun it. The human rein which we’ve envisioned as everlasting is finally coming to an end, with only a few survivors left, scattered, isolated, surrounded by hordes of undead, and most importantly of all, barren of hope.
Through this world readers are introduced to main character Sloan. Not much is revealed about Sloan’s life before the apocalypse other than the fact that she was an average high schooler with a troubled home life.
Sloan’s father abused her, and as a result she is left psychologically scarred, having a toxic relationship with silence. Sloan’s dad is one of the first characters to die, but his ghost continues to haunt her, day and night, as she struggles to survive because she can still feel his ghastly fingers of the bruises he left on her psyche.
Perfect for fans of films and TV shows featuring a zombie apocalypse like the Walking Dead, readers are given very little time time to prepare for what is to come; at the turn of the first page, the undead are already wreaking havoc on Sloan’s street.
Sloan and four of her classmates stumble across on another survivor and decide to team up, despite their mutual adversities for the sake of survival. Ironically, they wind up taking refuge at their school–the same place no teenager wants to be.
Unlike many other zombie-themed franchise, this book isn’t centered around simply eviscerating zombies. In fact, there are only a few scenes in which the five teenagers are forced to defend themselves, but the avid detail Summers puts into them makes up for the lack in quantity.
This novel doesn’t explore the biological and scientific causes of this zombie pandemic, and is more focused on humanity’s resilience in face of extermination, the “end of the world.”
The characters are the bulk of this story because most of it is spent exploring their struggles not only before the apocalypse, but how they are holding up after it has begun. Like most of her other works, she explores thought-provoking themes through these characters.
This is Not a Test is the exact opposite of what the title implies. There is a test, and it is the five teenagers who are tested.
