about the book
Desperate to escape the foster care system, Benson Foster applies for Maxfield Academy in New Mexico, hoping that the boarding school will give him the freedom he desires. What he finds instead is that he has gone from a hell on earth into an actual hell—Maxfield is a prison of a demonic kind.
There are no adults. The students are forced to do everything—from teaching to cleaning up bathrooms. There are four rules: 1. No violent fighting. 2. No sex. 3. Punishment must be accepted without complaint. And 4. No one must try to escape.
Breaking these rules leads directly to death.
The fourth rule is the one Benson begins breaking immediately. He searches as under-the-radar as he can, hoping to find any loophole, any secret passage or chink in the Academy’s walls. In his snooping, he discovers a terrible secret.
Some of the students are not students at all, but something else.
about the author
It was in 1999 that Robison Wells began writing professionally as the theater critic for “Red Magazine,” a weekly publication on the arts at the University of Utah. It was poor writing, by his account. Shortly after doing that he began writing his first novel— also terrible.
2004 saw his first published novel, On Second Thought, a romantic comedy based in a small town in New Mexico (like in Variant). Two more books followed, but they were all published by a regional press, and so would not be sold nationally or worldwide—and that’s what he really wanted.
Instead, in 2007 Robison went back to school for an MBA in marketing from Brigham Young University. Using his previous sociology experience, he became involved in the “squishier sides of business,” meaning consumer psychology and behavior. During this time he decided also that he wanted to write YA fiction.
Graduating in 2009 with the stock market at its record low numbers, he once again was unemployed. He used his unemployment to write Variant, and is no longer unemployed.
Source:
Author website
Also by Robison Wells:
Blackout. Harperteen. 2013.
Feedback (Variant, Book 2). Harperteen. 2012.
read more!
Feedback (Variant, Book 2) by Robison Wells
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