ReReading (or Listening!): This is Not a Test by Courtney Summers (Courtney’s Edition)

I don’t reread a lot of books and, when I do, it’s usually because something about the story never really left me. This Is Not a Test is one of those books. I remember how it made me feel, and listening to the updated version reminded me that feeling isn’t fixed…it changes as you do.

With the movie out in just a few weeks, now is the perfect time to pick up This is Not a Test. Check out why below!

This Is Not a Test: The Definitive Edition with Please Remain Calm

by Courtney Summers
on June 19, 2012
Bookshop
Goodreads

It’s the end of the world. Six students have taken cover in Cortege High but shelter is little comfort when the dead outside won’t stop pounding on the doors. One bite is all it takes to kill a person and bring them back as a monstrous version of their former self.
To Sloane Price, that doesn’t sound so bad. Six months ago, her world collapsed and since then, she’s failed to find a reason to keep going. Now seems like the perfect time to give up. As Sloane eagerly waits for the barricades to fall, she’s forced to witness the apocalypse through the eyes of five people who actually want to live.
But as the days crawl by, the motivations for survival change in startling ways and soon the group’s fate is determined less and less by what’s happening outside and more and more by the unpredictable and violent bids for life—and death—inside.
When everything is gone, what do you hold on to?

Review

When I first read This Is Not a Test, it stayed with me in that specific Courtney Summers way; quiet, heavy, and uncomfortable (or as they like to say, unlikable) in places that felt intentional. At the time, what I connected to most was the numbness, the depression, the sense of going through the motions even as the world was ending. It wasn’t a book that offered relief or answers, and I respected it for that.

Listening to the updated version, though, something clicked in a way it hadn’t before. The emotional beats felt sharper, but what really stood out was how certain relationships were allowed a little more space to breathe. There’s a subtle but meaningful shift in how desire and connection show up, especially in the way Sloane relates to other girls, and it made the story feel more honest to how messy and unformed that kind of realization can be.

As a late bloomer, that mattered to me. There’s something deeply familiar about not knowing what you want, only knowing that something is there. That pull, that tension, without language or clarity or permission to explore it. Sloane isn’t someone who has room to interrogate her identity or desire, and the book never forces her into certainty or labels. Instead, it lets that wanting exist in the background, unresolved and complicated, which feels far more true to a lot of queer experiences than neat declarations ever could.

This reread made it clearer to me that the book has always been doing this work (gesturing toward longing, toward connection that doesn’t fit neatly into binaries) but hearing it now, with a bit more room given to those moments, changed how I understood them. What might once have been read as rivalry or fixation now feels like desire that doesn’t yet know how to name itself.

Coming back to This Is Not a Test now felt less like revisiting an old favorite and more like recognizing something that had been there all along, waiting for me to be able to see it. The book hasn’t softened with time, but my understanding of it has deepened. And that feels exactly right for a story that’s always been about surviving without resolution, and about the quiet, complicated truths we don’t always have the space to claim.