Time Bomb by Joelle Charbonneau (review)

Six students, each burdened with a secret and a duffle bag, head to their high school a week before it begins for separate reasons. There’s overachiever Diana; varsity quarterback Frankie; viciously bullied Cas; angry Z; heartbroken Tad; and rebellious Rashid. When a series of bombs goes off, the six eventually find their way to one another amid the wreckage, only to learn from news sources that one of them is responsible for the damage. With the threat of more bombs in the building, first responders are holding back, leaving the teens to fight amongst themselves about the best way to handle their increasingly dire situation. The characterization suffers as much from its clichéd, Breakfast Club–style diversity as from the equally predictable flipping of those clichés, namely that the macho football players are gay, Muslim Rashid is consistently heroic in action and outspoken on behalf of any assumptions his classmates may make linking terrorism to Islam, and the bomber, by ostensibly being the one you least suspect, is of course the most likely culprit. True to the genre, every character gets an opportunity to scold the others for what they feel is wrong with how they are perceived; the one surprise comes, perhaps, when Tad acknowledges that just because a boy kissed him doesn’t mean he gets to assume that the boy is therefore gay. Despite the predictability, however, the story, told from alternating perspectives, is compulsively readable, and both the premises and the indignant sermons are timely.