Panic by Lauren Oliver Book Review/Talk

Title: Panic
Author: Lauren Oliver
Published: 2014
Rating: 0/5 STARS 
Pages: 408

Short Summary (from inside of book provided by publisher): 
"In the poor town of Carp, New York, a group of teens enters a high-stakes game that involves a series of secretive, possibly deadly challenges throughout the summer, with the winner receiving more than $50,000-- enough money to start a new life."

Review/Talk: So many people on BookTube and on Goodreads have given this book 4/5 stars, 5/5 stars, so I was extremely excited when I came back home from the bookstore with this book. I just knew that I was going to love it just as many others had. However, starting from page one, I was never drawn into the story. The story starts off with the beginning 'challenge' of Panic which is 'The Jump'. Already, the main character starts talking about some boy who she loves and is frantically searching for him, only to find him with someone else. It is because of this that she decides to enter the game 'Panic', which I thought was the worst possible reason to enter. Although her reasons changed throughout the book, her very first reason was because her boyfriend had cheated on her. 
I thought that this whole game would have been more organized instead of the way it was. I thought there would be this one area where multiple different obstacles were held, not just whatever was in the neighborhood. For an example, if there was a 'haunted house' in Carp that people were known to be afraid of, that's where one challenge would be held. If there was some crazy person in the neighborhood that people were afraid of, that's where a challenge would be held. It all just seemed like really stupid homemade challenges that teens would do in a game of Truth or Dare. Yes, some of them were really crazy, but most of them were really stupid.

Usually, in a good story, you fall in love with the characters, but in this story, I absolutely did not. They were like most teens that you see on TV shows now, going to parties and drinking and what not. There was nothing interesting about these characters, and I did not like them AT ALL. The main character was very blah ,and when she was not with the others, we learn about her life at home. We learn about her relationship with her sister and her parents, and the same thing repeats throughout the story. We are also introduced to Anne, which is the woman that the main character, Heather, begins to work for. I felt like this was so out of place. We go from a crazy teen party to talking about her job with chickens and tigers and dogs. What? To me, it didn't fit into the story at all, and it was such a weird transition. I loved when we see her working at Anne's house, but to me, it felt like the readers were in a different world compared to the other parts of the book.

I was also very confused throughout this book and some of the individual challenges, but I don't want to spoil you guys, so I'm not going to go into detail about that, but I didn't really know what was going on during parts of this book. I was frustrated and angry because it just didn't make sense. 

Just talking about the book brings me back into the world ,and I hated it so much. I regret buying this book, since I am not able to go to the bookstore often. I liked Delirium, by Lauren Oliver, but this book was just not good at all to me. I was very disappointed, and I hope that I am not the only one who thinks this. 

What did you think of Panic by Lauren Oliver? Let me know in the comments!