Member Review

First of all, thanks to NetGalley and Justine from Inkyard Press for sending me an eARC in exchange for a honest review.
You have to know English isn’t my first language, so feel free to correct me if I make some mistakes while writing this review.


When I started high school the first year, there were two girls in my class from the previous year who had failed the class and had to repeat the year - that's how it works here in Italy. I don't know when and how the topic came up, but later we had learned that just the year before - so when I was in middle school - an occupation had taken place in my school complex.

It had seemed so unbelievable and so cool to me that I hoped it would happen again while it was me who was in high school. I still believed that everything would've changed, I believed high school would've represented a new beginning and I would have left middle school behind - that I would have made many friends, I would have had an adolescence like the one I had seen on TV shows and that an occupation would've brought that kind of magic that seemed to permeate the event even just by its name.

I would've soon changed my mind.


However, CIS' lock-in is not an occupation like the one that took place in my school complex. When it happened in 2002, students left teachers out of school for three days - so I was told - and they did it to protest against the war.


CIS' lock-in is a different kind of event and it occupies the entire campus, teachers "volunteer" to supervise and engaging the kids on a whole series of activities ranging from sports to audiovisual to theatrical ones.
It's the night towards the end of the school year that everyone is waiting for, the one in which all the kids are free to try new things, make new friends or mend up a relationship - maybe you can even find out that your crush on that person is reciprocated and not one-sided as you thought. It's a magical, legendary night where everything is possible.

CIS is an international school, attended by rich kids or diplomats' sons - kids who often attend only for a year, kids who frequently move due to their parent's work and that have already seen half of the world and taken on the inflection of dozens of different accents. This is why you must seize the moment on the night of the lock-in.

All our main characters have high expectations for this magical night.

Amira is a Muslim girl who has abandoned religion and she keeps it hidden from her mother. But that's not the only thing that she hides from her - Amira is an exceptional athlete, capable of breaking down even the gender division of the school decathlon race for which she has prepared so much ... but her mother doesn't know it. This is because there is the Amira everyone knows at school and the Amira who is a different person at home with her mother, who does nothing but repeat to Amira all the things that a girl can't do - all things that instead make Amira even more stubborn in her want to do them.

Celeste is new to CIS - or rather, relatively new since she has been attending school for eight months but has no friends. She hasn't traveled enough, doesn't have an exotic enough accent, it's not even good enough for Americans like her either. Celeste does nothing but think about the life she left in Illinois and in which she was sure she knew her place ... not so much here at CIS.

Kenji is a freshman and if Celeste can count on the support of her parents and feels better at home with them than at school, for Kenji it's quite the opposite. He loves the art of improvisation, he loves to stage infinite possibilities and go with whatever anyone has to say, he loves to say "yes, and ..." just because at home he has to deal with an always serious father who always says no.

Peejay is a senior with a huge charisma that makes everyone listen to him. He was chosen by the prior Partyer in Chief to organize the annual CIS party - the one that has to go unnoticed by the teachers' eyes, the one where you have to hide alcohol and music trying to give your peers an unforgettable party they will talk about for years. Peejay wants everything to be perfect because the role once belonged to his brother Hamish and all Peejay wants to do is organizing a party that is up to the challenge and making his brother proud.

Omar is one of Amira's main opponents at decathlon, or rather the only one. Tall and big, but also incredibly shy, so much so that he always tries to steal a look at the boy he has a crush on from a distance.

Then Marisa is there to wreck everyone's plans.
Marisa - the girl who loves the ocean, loves swimming, loves diving, loves the environment and suffers from seeing it so ruined. What better way to be noticed and to be heard if not blocking all the exits by chaining yourself to the doors along with your friends on the night most awaited by everyone?
The lives of those who remain inside the main building will no longer be the same after that night - not even the ones of those who remained outside, both observing the unfolding of the events and wishing to be inside to be part of whatever is going on inside.

When does a protest begin to turn into a situation in which those present are held hostages?

When does the fine line between activism and terrorism begin to blur?


I feel in conflict with this book because I feel in conflict with the girl who started the whole thing: Marisa.
On one hand, I appreciated her and her strength in resisting under the pressure of everything and everyone - even facing (without batting an eye) the anger shown by the kids she trapped in with her in the main building when it becomes violent and physical - that strength is certainly to be admired, as well as the strength of her beliefs. I mean, I recycle and do everything I can not to contribute to pollution - in fact, I am the first to scold a friend of mine who's a bit careless on that matter - but I understood very well the anger of her peers in seeing her stealing the magic of a night who they have been waiting since the beginning of the school year because she wanted to hit them right where it would've hurt. Just like she felt the last time she saw the reefs.

But it's an implausible story under many aspects - I understand an international school where safety must be top priority, but there can't be a school whose windows don't open and are made of a glass/plexiglas so shatterproof to be impossible to break through - it's not safe. Not that those from my school were, huh - most of the windows faced inner courtyards with no way out and they had slats that acted as a sunshade and when it was so hot you couldn't breathe, the only thing you could do was to punch them so that they slipped off their base and fell down into the courtyard. But at least they opened.

One of the things I didn't like so much were the too long phrases, the talking taken too far. There is a particular point in which we come to know that one of the requests from Marisa's list has been granted, but before telling you what it is, there's a whole discussion on how much Marisa didn't expect that it would even be taken into consideration because the she had put it down without thinking and to hide what she actually wanted to achieve ... and so on for at least four more paragraphs and I was there like "heck, tell me what it is and let's get it over with!"

The book is described as a sort of "Breakfast Club", but in reality we hardly ever see kids interacting with each other - they are all too busy with their personal problems, but this is a positive aspect and it means they are well-developed. Its main flaw is that too much is told when it was supposed to be shown, so you don't really understand why all this sudden admiration - love - for Marisa.
The rest of the students remain in the background, a herd of sheep that only comes to life when Peejay speaks - and do I really have to believe that the teachers managed to keep kids in class working on assignments in the days following the lock-in? Please.

I would have liked to see more reactions, more rebellion or more solidarity, more concrete motivations for which someone has decided to join Marisa or to turn against her - and it will also be a silly motivation, but one of the things I most disliked about this book is that if most of all the other characters' nationality isn't mentioned or if it's done, it's only in passage to point out that, for example, despite being American, Celeste is not automatically accepted by other Americans or that Kenji's family is half Japanese and half English, coincidentally when one of the "bad" guys does something to hinder Marisa, it's stressed that he is Italian. Thanks, huh.

The starting and basic idea of ​​the book is good: diverse characters by race, religion, sexual orientation, family, problems; a serious problem such as the environmental one that is leading the world to increasingly evident and devastating climate changes if we don't change something; kids who have the courage to fight for what they believe in when adults instead stand by and watch or wait for someone else to do it for them.

However, there are logistical and dynamic situations that are implausible: the parents are specks, caught by the mass hysteria or indifferent to the point of accepting that their children can remain trapped inside a school for an indefinite time; students who accept equally passively without rebelling while Marisa dictates the rules on two hundred people closed inside the building.

I don't know, there is something missing from this book or simply out of place - and it's a shame because the idea was good, especially the one of highlighting how environmental activism sometimes quickly turns into terrorism in the eyes of the most.

Perhaps three stars will seem generous to you given that apparently I demolished the book, but I thought about it and I gave a lower rating to books that had more serious "flaws" than this one.