Book Review: Panic

Teenagers.  Deadly games.  One winner.  Sound familiar?  Thanks to the wild success of YA mega-hitters The Hunger Games and Divergent, we are at no short supply for teens-and-violence novels. The good news for Panic, the latest by Lauren Oliver, is that she steers clear of the sci-fi, dystopian genre, and grounds this book solely in the realistic, present day.  Panic has more in common with Maggie Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races, minus the magic water horses.  Panic is set in the small town of Carp, New York, a somewhat poor town where many dream of getting out, but few have the resources to do it.  Somewhere along the way, Carp's high school student body created a game called Panic.  Every student has to pay into the pot - or suffer the consequences.  Only graduated seniors are eligible to play.  The last man standing wins the pot.

Of course, the challenges are reckless and illegal.  The local cops have been itching to bust Panic for years.  Given that it kicks off at the same time and place every year, one would think the police would have figured out how to stop it before it starts.

Oliver switches back and forth between two players: Heather and Dodge.  Each has her (or his) own motivations for winning.  Heather lives with her druggie mother and innocent little sister in a trailer park. Winning Panic would pay for a way out of Carp.  Dodge is playing for revenge.  His older sister, Dayna, was injured and paralyzed playing Panic several years earlier.  Dodge wants payback.

My main problem with Panic is that neither Heather nor Dodge are sympathetic enough for me to really care about either one of them winning the game.  Unlike Stiefvater's The Scorpio Races, where I was truly torn between wanting Puck or Sean to win, Oliver didn't get me to fully invest in her main characters.  The other main issue with the book is that the challenges - although dangerous - aren't terrifying or frequent enough.  They come across as something you'd see on Fear Factor, if dreamed up by teens.  (One of the challenges involves running across a busy highway, blindfolded.  I kept hearing the movie Dodgeball in the back of my mind: "If you can dodge traffic, you can dodge a ball!")

Panic was a quick read for me, and I do enjoy Oliver's writing.  This would be a recommended addition for high school libraries where students are devouring Divergent and are asking, "What else do you have?"