Books Boys Like: The Compound

I love gritty speculative fiction, even though it has a tendency to give me bad dreams. The scenarios lie on the borders of the realm of possibility, just a little too close for comfort and utterly gripping. So, of course I picked up The Compound, by S. A. Bodeen.

Eli Yanakakis’s billionaire father has always warned the family about the possibility of nuclear war, the need to disappear underground when the bombs hit. On Eli’s ninth birthday, that time comes. The whole family flees to the state-of-the-art bunker Mr. Yanakakis has prepared for them in eastern Washington—the whole family except Gram and Eli’s twin brother Eddy.

Six years later, Eli is wracked with guilt and starting to worry for himself and the rest of his family. There’s no way their food supply is going to last the whole fifteen years needed to survive a nuclear winter, and Mr. Yanakakis is behaving strangely. He’s the only one with the code to the exit. What else is he hiding from Eli and his family?

This page-turner is packed not only with mystery and action, but also plenty of fodder for discussion. I could easily see it being a teen or parent/son book group selection for junior high age and up.

One quibble.

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So, the big reveal is that Eli’s family is actually trapped in the bunker on Mr. Yanakakis’s whim. One, of course, wants to know why. The father in The Mosquito Coast drags his family to Central America because he despises American culture. The father in The Poisonwood Bible refuses to evacuate his family from the Congo because he’s on a mission from God. Their obsessions distort their reasoning, pushing it over the edge into the realm of insanity, but everything they do still makes sense in its own scary way.

Bodeen gives Mr. Yanakakis his reasons, too, but I couldn’t quite buy them. Making a bunker prototype to sell for gazillions of dollars? A little nuts, but okay: greediness is a fine motivator. Trapping your family inside it to spend quality time with them? Again, crazy, but family values are a good motivator, too. But it doesn’t make sense to challenge your spoiled kids to be “brave and determined” by locking them in a bunker with a home theater, a gym, and other such niceties, then telling them they’ll have to eat their younger siblings or starve. What’s the motivation there? That’s just insanity talking, no logic behind it. That made the pay-off disappointing to me.

Still, as I said, there’s plenty to enjoy here and plenty to talk about. What I quibbled about above? Maybe it’s just me. I’d be interested to know what other people who have read it think.