The Compound by S.A. Bodeen

In my capacity as a member of the Nominating Committee for the Young Adult Cybils, I read with great enjoyment several books from the fairly new (2006) publisher Feiwel and Friends (The Poisen Apples, Carpe Diem, and Get Well Soon).* So when I was offered an advance reader copy of one of their new YA books, I jumped at it.

The book in question is The Compound, by S.A. Bodeen (coming this spring). The Compound could be described as Anne Frank meets The Shining, but I'll resist the temptation.

Here's how it starts:

"My world ended with a bang the minute we entered the Compound and that silver door closed behind us.

The sound was brutal.

Final.

An echoing, resounding boom that slashed my nine-year old heart in two. My fists beat on the door. I bawled. The screaming left me hoarse and my feet hurt."

Eli and his family are locked into the safty of the compound his billionare father had built to save them from nuclear war. His grandmother and his twin brother didn't make it, and were left outside to face Armeggedon. Now it is six years later, and life in the compound is disintegrating. The food is not going to last--parts of the father's plan appear to have been sabotaged, and other aspects of it are so twisted that they seem the work of a mad man. And indeed Eli's father is getting stranger and stranger, and Eli begins to wonder what exactly the Compound really is, and what might exist outside it.

We pick up the narrative after the family has been living in isolation for six years, so the Anne Frank aspect of it all--the interpersonal relationships tested by claustrophobic closeness--are not the focus of the plot, although clearly Eli's character has been shaped by these unnatural circumstances, and by his grief and guilt about his twin. We see events strictly through Eli's eyes, and he is not the most empathetic, aware narrator. He isn't particularly sympathetic, either--when a first person narrator has a low opinion of himself, it can be hard for the reader to think otherwise. Faced with the crisis developing in the compound, however, he gains maturity and becomes more likable.

The crisis, a spiraling insanity (the Shinning part, although there's no supernatural element), is grippingly portrayed. There are clues from the beginning that things are very twisted, to which Bodeen keeps adding. It's a real page-turning read, even though the answers to some big questions become obvious to the reader a bit before they become obvious to Eli.

I was slightly dissatisfied by how things were resolved--it's not quite clear how insane the father really is. But this is a book I'd be happy to recommend to the young teen who like thrillers. It struck me as a book I'd recommend this to readers who liked The Shadow Children, by Margaret Peterson Haddix--similar in its plot of children trapped in mysterious circumstances.

*I'm not alone in this--see this post from Trisha over at the Ya Ya Yas.