Crazy House - Book Review

Patterson, J. (2017). Crazy house. NY: JIMMY Patterson Books

Crazy House is a dystopia, suspense filled science fiction of teenage twins who live in a futuristic society of what is now the United States.  The sisters live in a “cell”, which is a mandated community by the “United”, which is the governing body.  Each cell produces a certain good or product, that is then distributed to the other cells.  Cassie and Becca live in an agricultural cell where farming is the main vocation.  In school, the sisters are taught that the most important things in life are being good citizens and contributing to the United.  They are assigned a vocation at a young age, and all of their education is centered around that vocation.  Cassie is the model student and citizen.  She is surprised when her rebel sister, Becca, disappears, but is not completely shocked, just things Becca is acting out again.  However, when she can not find Becca, she starts to panic and frantically search for her sister.  Since their mother was taken away by the government for a “mood-adjustment” and never returned, and their father has been hospitalized after a failed suicide attempt, it was up to Cassie to find Becca on her own.  She searches in some of the places Becca usually hangs out with her other “loser” friends, and finds out that Becca was taken.  By who?  No one knows.  During her search, Cassie finds out that Becca was an “outsider”, a group of people who rebel against the government.  In this group is also the Provost’s son, Nate, which is shocking since the Provost is the leader of their cell.  Nate decides to help Cassie find Becca and the other missing children from their cell.  When Cassie gets expelled from school and loses her vocation because of being associated with the bad citizens within her family, she decides to venture beyond the cell boundary where she is also kidnapped.  Both sisters are taken to a prison called Crazy House where all of the inmates are children on death row.  In this prison, they are tested in every way imaginable from mental tests on subjects they learned in school, physical tests of training and combating other children, to emotional testing of watching other inmates being executed.  Surprisingly, Nate and a local boy who lived outside the prison, decide to try to break into the prison to try to free Cassie and Becca.  However, they are also captured.  After countless near death experiences, the four of them, Cassie, Becca, Nate, and the local boy, devise a plan to try to escape through a legendary tunnel the local boy heard about.  They actually manage to find the tunnel, survive the life threatening crawl, and return to their cells. Upon returning, the twin sisters find that their home is being sold and their future is bleak if they remain in their home cell.  The Provost is furious and blames the sisters for getting his son involved.  Miraculously, the girls share their horror story of the Crazy House where children are imprisoned and executed and gets members of the community to follow them back to the prison to rescue the remaining children.  When they arrive back at the Crazy House, it is completely deserted leaving the sisters looking like liars, manipulators, and worse of all, bad citizens.  Just when they think they are at rock bottom with no hope, they are kidnapped again and brought to where the Crazy House has been relocated.  It is there that the leader of the Crazy House, Ms. Strepp, reveals that the Crazy House is actually a part of the “outsiders” rebellion against the government and that they have been training the girls to be the next leaders of the rebellion.  The children were not really being executed.  They were using the appearance of execution, mental, physical, and emotional torture, and the ultimate complete break down of the children to prepare them for the battles of ahead.  They now did not fear death, and could therefore lead the rebels against the suppressive government. 

I felt like this author did a great job of creating a futuristic society that seemed far-fetched, but also possible at the same time.  In this society, they created a perfect balance for efficiency, which included population control.  When someone died, a baby was born.  This was controlled by having a baby wait list that couples would join if they wanted children.  When they were notified that it was their turn on the list, they were given three months to get pregnant, otherwise they were moved back to the bottom of the list.  Deaths were controlled through a Suicide Assistance Service (SAS), where the government would offer the free service of painlessly assisting in lethal injection.  This was presented as a service to the society if you were no longer contributing because it allowed a new potential good citizen to be born.  While reading, a part of me thought about how crazy and unrealistic these ideas are in today’s world.  However, the other part of me thought how scary it would be if our society transformed into this Crazy House idea.  I enjoyed the relationship between the twin sisters, Cassie and Becca.  I loved how they were different, but still loved and accepted each other’s differences.  I enjoyed the sisterly banter of being annoyed and competitive with each other, but at the end of day (or end of their lives in this case), there was no one they loved more than their twin.  This novel was also a great example of empowering teenagers to change the world.  In this story, the characters saw a problem and fixed their eyes on setting it right for all types of people.  They believed in themselves and accomplished the unimaginable at the tender young ages of teenagers. 

To learn more about the author, visit this website:  http://www.jamespatterson.com/