Saturday, January 14, 2012

Trapped by Michael Northrop




A huge Nor’easter drops a ton of snow on a Massachusetts town and traps seven students and one teacher in their rural high school.  What follows is a survival tale spanning five days and countless cold, dark hours in the school.  15-year-old sophomore basketball player Scotty Weems narrates and tells the reader up front that not everyone will survive.  The students have to find food and a place to hole up for the duration.  As the power fails and then the emergency lights fail, they will have to work together to survive and with this mix of personalities that might be difficult.  Then the pipes freeze and the roof collapses and romance goes bad and jealousy leads to fights.  Who will survive and how?  Will they be rescued and when?  Does anyone even know they are there?

The novel got a little muddy in the middle, maybe because we knew from the first pages that not everyone would survive, so the reader was just waiting to find out who and how.  It’s nice to have a male narrator in a non-sports book for a change.

Themes:  survival, teamwork, priorities, perseverance, ingenuity


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