Sunday, September 13, 2009

Book Review 14: Compound by S.A. Bodeen

I liked the premise of this book, it actually reminded me of the movie with Brendan Fraser called Blast from the Past, only the book wasn't humorous. The Yanakakis family is a rich and famous one. The father, Rex, was a computer genius. He was worried about nuclear war, so he build the compound. The compound was set up with a full school-size gymnasium, a livestock area, a hydroponics area, huge storage warehouse, doctor's office, beauty salon, each person in the family had their own bedroom, a fancy kitchen, you name it, it was there. They even had running water and electricity. But unfortunately when the bombs get dropped, Eli's twin brother and their grandmother get separated and don't make it to the compound before they have to close and lock the door. So it's just Dad, Mom, Eli's adopted sister Lexie, Eli, and his younger sister Teresa. Soon something goes wrong with the livestock and they have to kill and burn them instead of being able to eat them. Mom notices something is wrong with the wheat. Soon their father must figure out a way for them to survive when the stores they have will run out. Because it will take 15 years for the surface to be safe for them. And the way he figures out, they're called supplements, another way to get protein, if you can think of them that way.

But Eli finds a laptop in his twin brother's unused room that still has an internet icon, and when Eli clicks it, he finds the internet is still there. And Eli begins to wonder, is what his father told him the truth? And why would his father go to such extremes to try to save them, when it is really very unbelievable that his father could have even made the mistakes in the first place that lead to those kind of extremes. This was a really good book, I liked it a lot. The boy, Eli, was kind of sullen, not the "good twin" but that probably made it more interesting.

Today I started Little Audrey by Ruth White.