Quarantine
James Phelan
Hachette Children’s Books
2011, 264p
Read from my local library
It’s been eighteen days since the catastrophe hit New York City. Jesse, a sixteen year old student from Australia was in New York for some kind of leadership camp run by the United Nations and was on the subway when everything changed. He emerged from underground and found a city burning and destroyed, found the remaining surviving citizens changed beyond all recognition.
Jesse has sheltered in 30 Rock and in the Zoo. He’s found other survivors, small pockets of them and when rumours hit of a large group of survivors down in another party of the city, he feels he owes it to his fallen friend Caleb to seek them out. He, Rachel and Felicity need to get out of the city and given the amount of infected Chasers out there in the streets, there’s safety in numbers.
So Jesse journeys alone across the city, searching for survivors, this large group in particular, avoiding the infected and yet searching for his friend Caleb as he tries to put the pieces of the puzzle together. When he finds that the large group of survivors do exist and are exactly where he was told they were, Jesse sets about trying to convince them that after what he found out from those that looked like they were in the military, they need to get out of the city. There are people in that large group that are reluctant but Jesse has the information to back it up.
Quarantine is the final book in the Alone trilogy. I read Chasers in 2010 and then Survivor late last year. Although I felt that there were some flaws in each, the story was interesting enough to keep me invested enough to track down the final installment. It’s a quick read at only 260-ish pages, and full of action. Jesse is once again racing across the city (guy possesses an awesome geographical knowledge of the city) to search for a large posse of survivors that Caleb had told him about in the previous novel. Jesse had been skeptical and when something happens to Caleb, he feels as though he owes it to him to find this group of people, to justify I suppose, the decisions and actions that led to what happened to Caleb in the latter part of Survivor.
There’s plenty going on and I have to say that Phelan packs a lot into this book (as he has in the rest of them) but there were a few things that didn’t sit well with me. I know Jesse is a 16 year old boy and they could probably pause in the middle of World War III and say that a girl was hot, but to Jesse, everyone was hot. He was forever finding girls and bonding with them and it’s taken to a whole new level in this book, which I found irritating. The entire three books take place over a time span of less than 3 weeks and surely everyone has more pressing things on their mind than just hooking up.
Secondly…the ending was a bit off for me. I won’t say that it ruined it or anything, but after these three books and all that had occurred, it was going to take an ending with a hell of a punch and a lot of answers to really do the lead up justice and I just felt that a lot of the directions became a bit tired and cliched. But I’m well aware that I am not the intended audience of this one and that maybe why I felt about it the way I did. If I were a 15yo boy I might’ve thought it was awesome. I also might not.
5/10
Book #5 of 2012
All The Books I Can Read 
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