"Outside a dog a book is man's best friend, inside a dog it is too dark to read!" -Groucho Marx========="The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." -Jane Austen========="I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book."-JK Rowling========"I spend a lot of time reading." -Bill Gates=========“Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.” -Jacqueline Kelly=========

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Review: Lockdown-Escape From Furnace by Alexander Gordon Smith

Lockdown by Alexander Gordon Smith is the first book in the Escape from Furnace series, an exciting and terrifying, dystopian-type thriller novel where children are sent to Furnace Penitentiary for life as a deterrent to crime.
Furnace Penitentiary: the world’s most secure prison for young offenders, buried a mile beneath the earth’s surface. Convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, sentenced to life without parole, Alex Sawyer knows he has two choices: find a way out, or resign himself to a death behind bars, in the darkness at the bottom of the world. Except in Furnace, death is the least of his worries. Soon Alex discovers that the prison is a place of pure evil, where inhuman creatures in gas masks stalk the corridors at night, where giants in black suits drag screaming inmates into the shadows, where deformed beasts can be heard howling from the blood-drenched tunnels below. -Goodreads
Lockdown has been extremely popular in my school library with male readers, even those I consider reluctant readers. Now that I have read the book I know why.  The action is intense, the antagonists are completely evil, and the injustice done to the inmates is palpable and despicable. Anyone who likes horror genre books and intense action in their reading material will find this book to be a perfect match.


My niece's young husband, Bobby, and I had a discussion about the book.  He was pleased to see it on my reading list, though he cautioned that after the third book, Death Sentence, the Escapre from Furnace series starts to lose steam and becomes repetitive and predictable. I haven't had any of my readers complain about this but I do know that quite often this is the case the deeper one reads in a series. It is unlikely that I will read book #2 in Escape From Furnace, Solitary, because I rarely read more than the first book in a series and it is really not my favorite genre personally.  However, I will be adding this book to my Nifty-Fifty cart next year as a go-to book for boys.

20 books in July Reading Challenge





3 / 20 books. 15% done!

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2 comments:

  1. Helen's Book BlogJuly 12, 2012 at 1:40 PM

    Glad to hear this a good one as I bought it this spring for my library! I'll definitely "push" it on students this fall

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  2. Rummanah AasiJuly 12, 2012 at 9:22 PM

    I agree that I wasn't blown away with Death Sentence. The reasoning behind the prison just didn't sit well with me. I thought the reveal was a bit too sudden and out of left field. I did enjoy it though.

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