The Death House
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4.2 • 30 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Lord of the Flies meets Never Let Me Go in this “moving and totally involving” (Stephen King) dystopian thriller from the internationally best-selling author of Behind Her Eyes
Toby’s life was perfectly normal . . . until it was unraveled by something as simple as a blood test.
Taken from his family, Toby now lives in the Death House; an out-of-time existence far from the modern world, where he, and the others who live there, are studied by Matron and her team of nurses. They’re looking for any sign of sickness. Any sign of their wards changing. Any sign that it’s time to take them to the sanatorium.
No one returns from the sanatorium.
Living in his memories of the past, Toby spends his days fighting his fear. But then a new arrival in the house shatters the fragile peace, and everything changes. Because everybody dies. It’s how you choose to live that counts.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Death House of this coming-of-age novel is where "defective" children abducted from their families are warehoused as they anxiously await the emergence of symptoms signaling their inevitable deaths. Toby, the appealing 17-year-old narrator, struggles to adapt to the grim sociology of the place, even as he copes with the usual teenage angst and moons over Julie McKendrick, his great love that might have been. But when freckle-faced Clara appears on the scene, the reader knows that Julie will soon be a fading memory and Toby is about to find love in the midst of death. Will he beat the odds? Will love conquer all? If Pinborough (Beauty) was aiming at Ishiguro territory, she has fallen short. Readers, rather than being sucked into her world, are more likely to find themselves distracted by a host of unanswered questions and resentful of the constantly escalating emotional manipulation. Young adults may enjoy this novel; adult readers will find it less Never Let Me Go and more Romeo and Juliet light.
Customer Reviews
Are you a defective?
Spoilers: All of the children in the book are in a death house, because scientists have found that their genes are defective. Each of the children begin to die. None of the workers there are caring. Finally a boy and a girl begin to get to know each other well and fall in love. They sneak out at night. Then the boy finds a letter in the matron’s office which says that he and another boy, Louis, are not defectives. Once he knows this it changes everything. Finally the day comes where a boat can carry them away, the three of them. But it turns out the girl has gotten sick and she is hiding it from her boyfriend. The boyfriend gets his friend Louis to the ship, then goes back to his girlfriend and they die together as soon as the tide comes into the cave that they always hid in. The end.