Suddenly in a juvenile death row prison, Becca Greenfield needs to be good until her sister Cassie can come and rescue her. First Cassie has to find Becca, though, because she seems to have disappeared without a trace……. Will Cassie be able to do what’s necessary to find and rescue Becca?
Crazy House by James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet drew me in with the mystery as to why Becca was in prison, even if she is supposed to be a rule-breaker. To be fair, I wasn’t searching for what genre this book was, I just wanted to read a good book by an author whose books for young adults I have enjoyed in the past. So, I got swallowed up by a need for answers as to why a small town teenage girl and others would be put on death row seemingly overnight because that’s something people seek answers for.
As for the actual story, so much goes unexplained until the very end, where the fact that this is indeed a dystopian novel, gets dropped on everyone: the Greenfield sisters, the friends they made along the way, and the reader. In my search for answers, I have even more questions now that need to be answered in a sequel or, even better, an entire series! What do the rebels do, exactly? The rebels that take action in the community the Greenfields live in are not actually a part of the official rebellion group. Every member is considered to be missing, how are they going to use that? As far as we know, these teenagers are not seen after they become a part of the rebellion. The one adult we know for sure who is a leader kills someone under the assumption that she works for the mayor. How did this even happen? The rich obviously took over, but everything is so intricate that it’s hard for me to picture this story being the end result for the fantasy that the rich one percenters had. There needs to be some suspension of reality because there are just huge question marks as to what is actually going on, like what actually makes this story dystopian? The rich are living it up in crazy expensive beach houses on the coasts while everyone else is working in their isolated communities that just do work in one industry. The government institution in the Greenfield’s community does not care that a lot of teenagers have actually gone missing and people believe that they just ran away. No one is allowed to go past the fence that surrounds the community. Everything points to Crazy House being dystopian, but I just have so many questions that are overriding the things that I enjoyed about this book, things that make it stick out from other dystopian books. At the end I had more of a hunger for answers than satisfaction that the Greenfield sisters are back together and safe with everyone who helped them.
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