The only thing worse than a good premise wasted on a bad book is having to read the book to figure that out. I couldn't even bring myself to do that however; I found myself routinely dragging my feet whenever I had a free moment to pick this one back up and after the infamous sea turtle scene I looked up the rest of the synopsis and skimmed some of the more important later chapters. I'm confident that had I given this book even more of my time than I already did, my overall impression would not have changed.

If nothing else this book validated my long-held belief that middle school-aged boys are absolute monsters that have no place in society. Still, I can't believe someone read Lord of the Flies and thought, "you know what? This isn't bleak enough," and proceeded to make these five little bastards. I despised some of these kids so much that I found motivation in reading only to see if bad things would happen to them. But even when that ended up happening it didn't feel rewarding; it felt like these miserable children were still coming out on top because they had taken up my time.

Maybe I could have overlooked some of the lesser elements of this book I disliked if the writing wasn't so distracting. It honest to god felt like there was a simile forced into every single paragraph. No object could ever just be described, it had to be compared to something else. And there were constant asides and anecdotes from the past that were dredged up in detail just to explain how something in the present reminded a character of something that had happened to them before. Once or twice this is excusable, even welcomed, but this happened constantly to the point where the flow of the story suffered.

A common mention I saw in reviews before picking this one up was the frequent mention of animal violence. At face value I don't have an issue with difficult content because I understand that the presence of content in media does not necessarily mean the endorsement of said content. But here it just didn't feel justified within the context of the story and came across more like a box being checked off to accomplish a cheap shock. I also struggle to discern any larger theme or idea of the story; the best that I can come up with is, "sometimes science experiments go too far"? But even that doesn't exactly hold up when it's eventually revealed that the very inciting incident of the plot was part of a larger experiment.

Maybe my disappointment stems from the fact that I wanted this book to be something more than it was ever intended to be.