If you can attend a school where there are no adults, where your fellow students are the teachers, the admin staff, the cafeteria workers, and some days you get to play paintball all day, and some days you study random topics like land surveying, and on top of all that, there is no such thing as tests or grades, would you jump at the chance?
Sounds good, doesn't it?  After being moved from one foster family to another, Benson Fisher thought he's finally got himself out of that depressing neverending cycle when his scholarship application for Maxwell Academy got accepted. In less than an hour at his new school though, Benson would give anything to be back in a foster home, because Maxwell Academy was only desirable if you could overlook a few things: there were cameras everywhere watching your every move, there were a ton of rules to follow, students who broke the rules and were sent to detention never came back. Stuff like that...
Oh, and once you were in, you could never leave the school again.
Benson was outraged at this prison-like treatment, and he couldn't figure out why the rest of the students didn't seem to be in any hurry to escape. Rather, after some arguing and fighting, the kids have reached a truce and organized themselves into three big gangs to govern themselves. Fine, they might be content to go to class and decorate for school dance and do all the "normal" high school stuff, but Benson was going to get away.


Books that have hit it big always has a slur of wannabes following in its footsteps, and they don't always measure up, but I think Variant is a worthy readalike suggestion for readers of Maze Runner. It was an intriguing read from beginning to end, especially the dynamics among the kids. It's scary when you realize that whoever that put these kids and lock them up in the school may not be the kids' biggest enemy. The kids themselves are going to be.  Then when Benson discovered the secret of one of his classmates, time's running out and everything got scarier and scarier (you'll never think about woodland creatures like deer and bunny rabbits the same again). And the cliffhanger ending... man, when's the next book coming out?
So pretty much nothing to complain about, except the cover!  There's got to be something more exciting than that.
To be published in October 2011. Thank you to HarperCollins for providing an advanced e-galley at netGalley.