As they did in Witch & Wizard (2009), Patterson and Charbonnet tackle teen resistance amid dystopian mayhem. According to its provost, "whose word is law," cell B-97-4275 boasts widespread health, employment, and a perfectly balanced population. Yet, for the first time in her life, longtime rule-follower Cassie Greenfield isn't so sure: a government mandated "mood-adjust" left her mother dead; a botched suicide attempt confined her father to the hospital; and now, her twin sister, Becca, has been taken, making her the ninth teen to vanish this year. To rescue Becca, Cassie will first have to join her in the "crazy house," a covert prison where disappeared teens withstand backbreaking training and relentless degradation. But as they prepare to combat their captors, the Greenfield girls quickly realize greater evil lurks outside the prison walls than within them. Though contrived dialogue and continual shifts in narrative perspective often hinder character development, action-packed fight scenes, flickers of romance, and Patterson's signature speedy chapters should satisfy teens who like their suspense served with a side of political revolt.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: It's Patterson. This ought to sell as much as the 3,000 other books he's releasing this year.

With Gabrielle Charbonnet. Cassie's twin, Becca, has disappeared from their small town in a dystopian world. Becca wakes up in a horrific prison she dubs the Crazy House, where beatings, tests, and executions are daily realities. Cassie is determined to find her sister, even if it means putting herself at risk. A promising concept is marred by characters with indistinct voices and sudden changes in characterization to move the plot.

A teen girl goes looking for her missing twin sister.In the absence of their parents, Cassie and Becca, both white, are doing their best to tend to the family farm. One morning, Cassie wakes up to discover Becca is missing. Meanwhile, Becca wakens in a horrific children's prison, in which the detained are forced to fight to the death. As Cassie searches for her sister, Becca does her best to survive the torture her captors put her through. The novel is set in a future in which populations are organized geographically into isolated cells. The government controls all the information going in and out. More lurks beneath the surface, and the book sets up further installments, but few readers will feel the need to keep reading. The world is poorly built, the characters are dreadfully thin, and the plotting is drastically uneven. When Cassie and Becca are finally reunited, readers will have little reason to celebrate: their relationship is so thinly sketched they barely feel like sisters. The torture sequences in the teen prison are gratuitous and dreary. A last-minute twist is easily predicted, making the slow, tedious burn toward the reveal and the barely distinguishable characters all the more intolerable. Yet another bland, half-baked dystopian exercise. (Dystopian adventure. 14-17)

In this boilerplate dystopian thriller, set in the not-too-distant future, twin sisters discover that their peaceful existence in a strictly regimented farming community is a lie and struggle to survive against overwhelming odds. When 17-year-old wild child Becca Greenfield is kidnapped and imprisoned in a terrifying, violent institution, her sister Cass is desperate to find out what happened. While Becca fights for her life, Cass enlists the aid of Nathaniel, the handsome son of her town-s provost, who-s part of an underground rebellion. As the sisters unravel the deadly secrets of the so-called crazy house, they-re shocked by the part it plays in a larger conflict between world-controlling elites and the general population. While the premise is sound, Patterson and Charbonnet (the Witch & Wizard series) offer up a derivative story with predictable twists, fairly shallow characters, and revelations that won-t surprise anyone familiar with the dystopian genre. The worst offense: when Becca casually reveals that she-s pregnant after being raped by a teacher, has a miscarriage, and overcomes the traumas in record time. Ages 14-up. (May)

Seventeen-year-old orphaned twins Cassie and Becca Greenfield live in the United, a rigidly controlled society of Sections further divided into thousands of township-like cells which produce food or manufacture goods for everyone. All citizens must stay united, faithfully performing their assigned tasks to make their cell the best. Cassie has always been one of the model citizens, succeeding in school while struggling to maintain the family’s farm. Her twin, however, is Cassie’s opposite, skipping school, hanging out with undesirable Outsiders, and breaking all the rules of citizenship. Becca is always disappearing, but this time it is serious. Seized by the authorities along with other undesirable teens, Becca is on death row in the brutal and nightmarish prison known as the Crazy House. Cassie, aided by Nathaniel, the cell leader’s son, and the Outsiders, must rescue her twin.
The collaboration responsible for the Witch and Wizard series writes again about teens rebelling against a dystopian political system. In this novel, the authors sacrifice style and character development in an effort to capture the teen market with a plot that relies heavily on violence and crude language. Stereotypical characters, lackluster worldbuilding, and a cliché-laden style would normally make this a marginal purchase, but libraries will be obligated to acquire this title because of Patterson’s name. The surprise ending, that will shock only the most unsophisticated readers, suggests a sequel in the works.—Jamie Hansen.