Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

No Safety In Numbers by Dayna Lorentz
Rating: 5/loved (1-5/hated-loved)


I should have written about No Safety In Numbers when I finished it, but I was in a depressed period and didn't feel like posting. I had loved it, but now I can't do it justice as to why.

The plot takes place in a mall. Saturday afternoon. Someone sets off a biological weapon and releases a deadly flu-like thing into the air. The CDC puts the whole mall under quarantine. People start quickly dying, so walls go up and windows are blocked to make sure that no one gets out -- this deadly disease can't be allowed to escape the mall.

The whole book takes place in less than a week. There were multiple main characters. Four (five?) POV characters. All teenagers, but this book made them both likeable and realistic, unlike so many other books where the teenage main character isn't someone you'd want to spend any time around, let alone read a book about.

Unlike many YA books like this, the adults were not only alive, but they were visible, realistic characters.

I enjoyed everything about No Safety In Numbers, and would highly recommend it (except to those people on my friends list who don't like stories containing the death of children -- lots of people died in this book, people of all ages).

No Easy Way Out (No Safety In Numbers: Book 2) by Dayna Lorentz
Rating: 2/disliked (1-5/hated-loved)


I should have written about No Safety In Numbers after I read it, because I disliked No Easy Way Out so much that it colored my memory of Safety.

Everything I liked about Safety was absent in No Easy. The teenagers, who had been likeable in the first book, were generally awful people in this one. The adults were either absent or there only to push teenagers' plot points along. The adult characters were also generally very unbelievable.

Heck, the teenagers were unbelievable, too. No Easy took place during the second week in the mall, and we were to believe that somewhere in the 7-14 day range, kids were willing to cold blooded murder people. Not only that, the teenagers believed that a senator (trapped in the mall with them) geneteched a whole new flu virus aimed at killing off just teenagers. I know teenagers can make bad decisions and believe out-there things, but would even they believe that a senator, someone with NO scientific background, could create a whole new virus? One that targets just teenagers?

All the things I enjoyed in the first book were absent in the second. Heck, the second was just flat out opposite of the first: The characters were unrealistic, the actions and decisions unbelievable, and there was way too much violence (violence for violence's sake, seemed like). I do not believe that a thousand or more people trapped in a mall for less than two weeks would go so bad that it would make Lord of the Flies look like a tropical beach vacation.

Though I'm curious about how the series will end, I doubt I'll read the third and final book.

Next up: Zhukov's Dogs... which apparently isn't on Amazon yet. Odd. I tried to link it, but can't. I accepted it for review almost solely based on its name. Someone *cough*loupnoir*cough* instilled a fondness for all things Russian when it comes to books. :) I hope it will be good, but I worry a bit. The book's summary states that the main female character has gray eyes, and gray eyes are always a really bad sign in a YA book. Having them mentioned in the summary sets off every alarm I have. Oh well, fingers crossed