Crazy House

A teen girl goes looking for her missing twin sister.In the absence of their parents, Cassie and Becca, both white, are doing their best to tend to the family farm. One morning, Cassie wakes up to discover Becca is missing. Meanwhile, Becca wakens in a horrific children’s prison, in which the detained are forced to fight to the death. As Cassie searches for her sister, Becca does her best to survive the torture her captors put her through. The novel is set in a future in which populations are organized geographically into isolated cells. The government controls all the information going in and out. More lurks beneath the surface, and the book sets up further installments, but few readers will feel the need to keep reading. The world is poorly built, the characters are dreadfully thin, and the plotting is drastically uneven. When Cassie and Becca are finally reunited, readers will have little reason to celebrate: their relationship is so thinly sketched they barely feel like sisters. The torture sequences in the teen prison are gratuitous and dreary. A last-minute twist is easily predicted, making the slow, tedious burn toward the reveal and the barely distinguishable characters all the more intolerable. Yet another bland, half-baked dystopian exercise. (Dystopian adventure. 14-17)

Grades 9-12. As they did in Witch & Wizard (2009), Patterson and Charbonnet tackle teen resistance amid dystopian mayhem. According to its provost, “whose word is law,” cell B-97-4275 boasts widespread health, employment, and a perfectly balanced population. Yet, for the first time in her life, longtime rule-follower Cassie Greenfield isn’t so sure: a government mandated “mood-adjust” left her mother dead; a botched suicide attempt confined her father to the hospital; and now, her twin sister, Becca, has been taken, making her the ninth teen to vanish this year. To rescue Becca, Cassie will first have to join her in the “crazy house,” a covert prison where disappeared teens withstand backbreaking training and relentless degradation. But as they prepare to combat their captors, the Greenfield girls quickly realize greater evil lurks outside the prison walls than within them. Though contrived dialogue and continual shifts in narrative perspective often hinder character development, action-packed fight scenes, flickers of romance, and Patterson’s signature speedy chapters should satisfy teens who like their suspense served with a side of political revolt. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: It’s Patterson. This ought to sell as much as the 3,000 other books he’s releasing this year.

Copyright 2017 Booklist, LLC Used with permission.

In this boilerplate dystopian thriller, set in the not-too-distant future, twin sisters discover that their peaceful existence in a strictly regimented farming community is a lie and struggle to survive against overwhelming odds. When 17-year-old wild child Becca Greenfield is kidnapped and imprisoned in a terrifying, violent institution, her sister Cass is desperate to find out what happened. While Becca fights for her life, Cass enlists the aid of Nathaniel, the handsome son of her town's provost, who's part of an underground rebellion. As the sisters unravel the deadly secrets of the so-called crazy house, they're shocked by the part it plays in a larger conflict between world-controlling elites and the general population. While the premise is sound, Patterson and Charbonnet (the Witch & Wizard series) offer up a derivative story with predictable twists, fairly shallow characters, and revelations that won't surprise anyone familiar with the dystopian genre. The worst offense: when Becca casually reveals that she's pregnant after being raped by a teacher, has a miscarriage, and overcomes the traumas in record time. Ages 14-up. (May)

Copyright 2017 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

Gr 8 Up-This first installment in a new dystopian thriller series centers on twin sisters living on their own in a highly regulated farming community. Trying to make it through high school so that they can start their vocations and keep off the radar of the watchful and authoritarian ruling body The United, Cassie and Becca have never been outside their little town, known as a cell. When rebellious Becca goes missing, the narrative splits into two—Becca's harrowing tale of the mysterious and violent prison she is being held in, and Cassie's determined attempts to rescue her. Neither of the sisters' voices rings true, and the farming metaphors both of them use feel clunky and heavy-handed. The book features Patterson's trademark short chapters, violence, teens breaking in and out of prison, and rapidly shifting alliances, but the lengthy stretches of awkward plotting dilute the suspense. The action does get going in the last few chapters, and a welcome reveal sets the story in a promising direction for future volumes. VERDICT This title will be in high demand among fans of suspense/thrillers, and things will hopefully pick up steam as the series progresses.—Beth McIntyre, Madison Public Library, WI Copyright 2017.

Copyright 2017 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.