Lockdown: Escape from Furnace 1

by Alexander Gordon Smith

Book Overview

In this prison, secret horrors are breaking free."Fresh and ferocious, Lockdown will hook boys with its gritty, unrelenting surprises." --James Patterson "Furnace is hotter than hell and twice as much... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374324913
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.9" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

High Interest for reluctant readers

I have taught with this book for at least 8 years. This is the one series that my most reluctant readers will finish. I would recommend this whole series to any student who loves the idea of hairless dogs dragging prisoners from their cells never to return......

Favorite Book!

Escape from Furnace is one of the best books I’ve ever read. This awesome book has you guessing what’s going to happen next with your heart beating fast. The story is well written & has you wanting to read more and never put the book down! I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for a good thriller.

brilliant read

I learned about Lockdown at a YA Literature conference. The presenter recommended Lockdown to teachers and librarians and claimed it was comparable to Hunger Games. Indeed, it was! I enjoyed reading Lockdown so much that I stayed up late every night devouring the text. The superb description of the Furnace captivated me. I could envision the claustrophobic sense of the deep and dark world. Describing everything in terms of black, gray, and red created an eerie, desperate tone that kept me reading. The characters were complete and believable. Their hopelessness, and ultimately their undying sense of hope for freedom, captured me. As an exciting read, Lockdown lacked nothing! It certainly was a brilliant read. I cannot wait to share the novel with my students! They will impatiently await Solitary; as will I.

A great book, but certainly for older readers

Ooh. I still have the chills. This book was delightfully disturbing. It was The Hunger Games, meets The Maze Runner. I found myself on the edge of my seat the whole time I was reading it. It's oh-so-very creepy & cruel to children. Which is my only warning, though that's a pretty big warning. This book was surprisingly clean when it comes to language. After all, a bunch of teenage boys in a prison that the cover describes as worse than hell probably wouldn't have the best language, but the swearing wasn't extreme at all. Mind you, that doesn't mean there wasn't any swearing, but it didn't bother me too much, and I'm quite sensitive to it. This book may end up giving me nightmares, but it was worth it. I love books with a good mystery. If you don't mind horror-books, and you liked The Maze Runner, and you're okay with characters that are FAR too young to be dealing with that kind of stuff, then check out Lockdown: Escape From Furnace Summary: This book is creepy, and definitely for older teen readers, but oh-so-very good.

LOCKDOWN

My summary: Alex was like any other boy. Go to school, hang out with his group, and control the monkey bars. But when he started stealing, his life changed for the worse. Out of nowhere, his best friend is murdered, and he is framed for it. he is sent to the child prison: a Hell hole. Worse than Hell. Furnace. When he's there, he is disgusted with the way people live. Kids do hard labor like chipping rock. Gangs kill kids. and he isn't the only innocent person who was framed. But there's no hope of escape. Nobody can escape furnace. Or at least, that's what they all say. But that's only because nobody ever has... What I felt: Personally, the first time I looked at the cover, I found it just a little disturbing. I thought "eh, I doubt very seriously I'll like that book. But hey--they want to send me a free book? I'll take a free book." So no, I didn't really like the cover. They could have done much better, either artistically or graphically or even with the colors. But that's just me as an artist and a girl :D so I did judge it. boy was that a mistake. The first sentence of this book seemed to grab me by the neck: "If I stopped running, I was dead." From there, the entire book held me and wouldn't let me go, from that first sentence to the very end. In fact, it held me after the end, too. I distinctly remember my blood racing, heart beating, sweating, adrenalin searing through my veins while I read this book! It was breathtaking and riveting to the last word. And even after the last word. I sat there, staring at the blank page, gasping and panting like a dog from lack of oxygen from reading a book. (that doesn't happen very often, people.) Characters: The characters in this book were very relatable. They weren't super people, they were real. They handled the horrific experiences of Furnace the same way I would have--screaming in their sleep, crying, throwing up from the horrors. Writing: the writing was very good--not one of those books where the author just says what he wants to say. Alexander Gordon Smith followed my creative writing teachers' first rule: Show, don't tell. It was an amazing thing to read, the language was very full in vocabulary, and it had good prose. There wasn't any really bad foul language either, like some of the other teen books I've been reading lately. Recommendation: this book is a thriller, not a horror book, even though it's mildly graphic (mildly. Not really that bad. Descriptive enough to be kinda gross at times... but hey, it could be just because I'm a girl.). It's not the most horrific book I've ever read, but it's certainly not for an eight-year-old. Personally I'd recommend it for anyone fourteen and up (but that's just me). I hope everyone gets a chance to read this book! It ranked my highest list: up with Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. Not only was the writing very good, but the plot was thick and complicated, intricately laid out, and mind boggling, and the characters were real people. [...]

Gritty, Exciting, Horrifying

Lockdown / 978-0-374-32491-9 It's 'Next Sunday A.D.', as they say, and the denizens of our near future have been traumatized by youth and gang violence to the point where 'tough on crime' laws have escalated to throwing youths convicted of murder away for life in a for-profit contractor prison built into a recently discovered underground fissure. Once a prisoner of "Furnace" you are there for life (or, more accurately, death) as there are no appeals, no humanitarian checks on the system, and the families of the convicted boys are rather surprisingly unconcerned with ever seeing them again - and though this premise might seem a bit flimsy, it's pulled off extremely well and the overall effect is incredibly immersive. During the day, the prisoners are put to work at hard labor (cleaning, cooking, expanding the tunnels of their prison to make room for incoming prisoners), and the afternoons and evenings are spent aimlessly trying to stay out of the way of gang warfare. The actual owners and staff of the prison are themselves exceedingly cruel and bizarre to an almost supernatural extent, and this is where most of the horror hinges. The guards are strong, fast, and sadistic, and spend much of their time in the outside world, murdering troubled teens in order to frame our protagonists and send a steady stream of 'new fish' to the Furnace. Mutilated guard dogs with iron teeth and exposed muscles and sinew are regularly released onto the inmate population, and anyone not safely inside their cell is instantly torn apart by the vicious creatures. Most terrifying of all are the bizarre, twisted man-like creatures that patrol at night - wizened, and doubled-over, they move in fast, shaky jerks, and they breathe laboriously through ancient gas-masks sewn into their flesh. The prisoners they choose as victims are taken away... and never seen or heard from again. Throughout all this, our narrator Alex manages to survive being dropped into this hellish nightmare, and even finds a few friends. In desperation, he dreams of escape, an escape other than flinging himself off the seventh floor balcony as so many others do. And while there are few punishments worse than that reserved for escape attempts (the last boy to try was publicly mauled by the prison dogs), Alex can think of nothing worse than waiting night after night for the gas-masks to come for him. I am incredibly impressed with the narrative of "Lockdown". The basic premise is set up quickly and efficiently, and we are dropped into the story with hearts still pounding from the opening hook. The author writes with a superb sense of pacing, and the horrific details of the prison unfold naturally as Alex comes to terms with the daily grind of his new life, and the numb terror that surrounds him. The seemingly supernatural nature of his guards is played carefully; we are never certain if the horrors he witnesses are spiritual in origin or some twisted Nazi-esque science at play, and the uncertainty adds t

Fantastic!

Lockdown by Alexander Gordon Smith Wow from the start and it doesn't stop! I couldn't turn the pages fast enough to keep up with the thrill ride that Smith created. This fast paced plot driven novel is exciting and adrenaline pumping! The Furnace Penitentiary, a prison for children offenders is a mile underground where the novel takes place. There is no other place like it. Offenders enter but never leave. Alex Sawyer convicted of a murder he didn't commit is sentenced there. What takes place following his arrival to the Furnace is a hugely gripping, intense read you won't be able to put down until the end. Even then you will be craving the next installment. I can't wait and I won't have to cause I just ordered it from the UK! This is easily one of the best book I have read this year!