Our high school's new literacy coach recently bestowed three copies of each of the winners of this year's Florida Teen Reads Award to each English classroom. Several were quite popular with my students, so I decided to pick them up and give them a whirl. My first pick was easy to make-- The Compound is a blend of postapocalyptic/ dystopian novel, and these are genres I really love. This story is about a family who is forced into an underground bunker when the U.S. is under nuclear attack. Eli is the eldest son, and also the narrator, and his father is a multimillionaire who has prepared for such a day by creating a lavish underground world called the compound, down to having his children trained in specialized fields (hydroponics, farming, butchering) so they can help sustain the family should they ever need to enter the compound. However, when such a day comes, the fallout is unpredictable; there are so many unanticipated glitches in the father's plan that affect the family in myriad ways. At times this book was almost too creepy-- there are definitely some lines the characters have to cross (or at least consider crossing) in order to survive, and much of the plot centers around the kids wrestling with touch choices. It is highly uncomfortable to think about how such a situation might truly play out... but I can totally understand why my students have been grabbing this off the shelf-- it's intriguing, chilling, and a highly imaginative scenario.
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