Panic- Lauren Oliver

Panic Cover

Title: Panic
Author: Lauren Oliver
Release Date: March 2014
Genre: Contemporary YA
Rating: 3.5 Stars
On the back:
"What will you do if you win?"
Heather shook her head.
She wanted to say:
Run until I burst.
Build miles and miles and miles between me and Carp. Leave the old Heather behind;
Burn her to dust.
Instead, she shrugged.
"Go somewhere, I guess. Sixty-seven grand buys a lot of gas."

Goodreads Description

Panic began as so many things do in Carp, a dead-end town of 12,000 people in the middle of nowhere: because it was summer, and there was nothing else to do.
Heather never thought she would compete in Panic, a legendary game played by graduating seniors, where the stakes are high and the payoff is even higher. She’d never thought of herself as fearless, the kind of person who would fight to stand out. But when she finds something, and someone, to fight for, she will discover that she is braver than she ever thought.
Dodge has never been afraid of Panic. His secret will fuel him, and get him all the way through the game, he’s sure of it. But what he doesn't know is that he’s not the only one with a secret. Everyone has something to play for.
For Heather and Dodge, the game will bring new alliances, unexpected revelations, and the possibility of first love for each of them—and the knowledge that sometimes the very things we fear are those we need the most

My opinion 

 I actually read it because a couple of my favorite book tubers made a Panic-Read-Along this month and I thought why not. I also didn't read a stand-alone in a while, so that was perfectly timed too and I am a big fan of Lauren Olivers Delirium Trilogy (well, most of it).

I loved the way the story was told. It was third person point of view in turn of Heather and Dodge and sometimes there were passages in which a noninvolved narrator would describe things that happened in Carp. This passages were probably my favorites.

I really liked the challenges of which the game Panic consisted, even though they were extremely dangerous and I'd consider everybody to participate in something so deadly crazy. These moments let me hold my breath and were really compelling and made the book totally worth reading.

I had problems with the characters. There were quite a lot of them in Panic, mostly unimportant ones, but at the beginning I got pretty confused with all the names. There were some characters I really liked, like Heather's best friend Bishop and the nice old lady Anne, but others, like Heather's other best friend Nat, or Dodge, I couldn't stand at all.

But there was a problem I had with all the characters. Their stories were pretty flat and therefor I couldn't really bring myself to care about most of them. Sometimes I also couldn't understand the motives behind their actions which made them seem a bit implausible

I also feel like a couple of the questions that came up while reading the book weren't answered or that story lines started but were never wrapped up.

The end in general seemed rushed and I would have liked to know what happened in the time between the last chapter and the epilogue.

Conclusion

While Panic was a light read for me with flat characters which I will probably forget pretty fast again, the challenges were awesome and it was really entertaining to read it.