The Well’s End by Seth Fishman (review)

When a disease starts causing students and faculty to age rapidly and die in a matter of hours, it doesn’t take long to declare emergency status at the ritzy boarding school Mia attends. Unfortunately, it’s too late to stop the spread of the disease, so Mia and a small group of her peers decide to make a break for the Cave, a top-secret “electronics” company where Mia’s dad works. A remarkable number of convenient saves later, they arrive to find that Mia’s dad and his coworkers are intricately tied to this virus, and to the only means of stopping it. There’s a cool core to the novel, magical water that only appears in a seventeen-year-cycle and that can be used as both a devastating weapon and a healing element. However, its impact is diminished by the book’s uninspiring bad guy (who isn’t all that much worse than the good guys once you actually analyze motivations and results), by the the too-frequent references to Mia’s childhood fall down a well, and by awkward exposition scenes that get the teens up to date on how the grownups have been mishandling the situation. Even with the flaws, there are strengths: Mia’s (ill-advised) steamy romance with a new student develops at an authentically frantic pace that matches the adrenaline rush of the rest of the novel, and a cliffhanger end opens up a new plot thread that may be worth pursuing.