REVIEW for Trapped

Thank you! thank you Nikole for discovering an ARC of this book and being so kind in sending it to me.

TITLE:                  Trapped


AUTHOR:            Michael Northrop


GENRE:               Novel


RATING:             3 Stars

I had heard quite a few positive things about this book.  In fact, it seems as though many bloggers raved about this one, so I was incredibly excited to read it, especially since I am a HUGE fan of "B" movies - anything depicting some kind of natural disaster gone awry - be it earthquakes, snowstorms or genetically altered locusts.

Interestingly, I started reading this book just as a major snowstorms hit the Eastern Coast of the US - dumping a ton of snow on New York (in fact this snowstorm was only the 5th biggest one for New York - since they have started monitoring these things) so it was huge.  Having said that, we actually did not receive as much as one snow flake in Montreal at that time - so I did not have to worry too much about "fiction" becoming my reality anyway, although I did feel for those poor people in the US.

Right off, I felt as though the writing was weird and a little all over the place.  The main plotline of 7 students being stranded in their school because of a huge snowstorm sounded really, really great - but the writing immediately turned me off.  Yes, I know that the premise is written from the point of view of young adults, who are put in a stressful and scary situation, but the author kept going off on tangents and weird directions that I just could not figure out and it seriously jeopardized the entire plotline.

The thing is - when you are writing this type of book, you have to sustain or increase the anxiety level of your characters, of the events and of the descriptions.  While the author would focus on detailing some of the events that were occuring he would then, for no apparent reason, start focusing on one of the main character's concern over a growing zit on his face.  While this may have been some kind of tactic to show us just how "scared" the character really was - by focusing on something like his zit, it simply did not work at all in the overall story telling.  In fact, it created passages that were boring, silly and more importantly, took away any type of suspense that may have been building.

I have to say that, in the end, this was just an okay read - I was disappointed because there was so much potential.