A review by protoman21
Panic by Lauren Oliver

3.0

I wanted to like this book. I wanted to LOVE this book. I'm not sure if I put too much hope behind this, for it to live up to those high expectations, or if it just was a fairly average novel with a ton of lost potential. No, I wasn't looking for a carbon copy of The Hunger Games, but I was hoping for something with a little more bite to it. The game of Panic is extremely dangerous and you have to suspend belief just to accept that this continues to happen in a small town for years and nobody has stepped in to stop these kids from putting themselves in life or death situations for a non-life-changing amount of money. That said, the death games the kids play were not very creative and didn't add much excitement or drama to the book. Underneath that is the characters and their relationships. A solid base where you love the characters and root for them completely could have saved this novel, but unfortunately they came up a little short. Not a lot short, but although I was fond of Heather and Dodge and did sympathize with their problems, I didn't connect on a deep level with either of them, and Nat was just that...a gnat. I didn't like the way she treated herself or other people. She wasn't all bad, but without getting her internal dialog, we never got a strong idea of who she was and what motivated her actions. Also the romances were pretty ho-hum, been there done that.