“As original as The Hunger Games, set within the walls of a high school exactly like yours.” – Kami Garcia, New York Times best-selling co-author of the Beautiful Creatures novels
It was just another ordinary day at McKinley High — until a massive
explosion devastated the school. When loner David Thorpe tried to help
his English teacher to safety, the teacher convulsed and died right in
front of him. And that was just the beginning.
A year later,
McKinley has descended into chaos. All the students are infected with a
virus that makes them deadly to adults. The school is under military
quarantine. The teachers are gone. Violent gangs have formed based on
high school social cliques. Without a gang, you’re as good as dead. And
David has no gang. It’s just him and his little brother, Will, against
the whole school.
In this frighteningly dark and captivating
novel, Lex Thomas locks readers inside a school where kids don’t fight
to be popular, they fight to stay alive.
"Take Michael Grant's Gone and Veronica Roth's Divergent, rattle them in a cage until they're ready to fight to the death, and
you'll have something like this nightmarish debut... Thomas' whirlwind
pace, painful details, simmering sexual content, and moments of truly
shocking ultra-violence thrust this movie-ready high school thriller to
the head of the class." - Booklist (starred review)
