Pages of Unexpectedness

The Bunker Diary Reaction

The Bunker Diary, a book by Kevin Brooks, was assigned for my book club. It definitely hooks you in immediately, and once I started, I could not put it down. It was just so suspenseful and felt so great. For those of you who have never heard of the book, it is an award-winning young adult fiction, probably best directed towards older teens, that revolves around the kidnapping of the main character, Linus, and his thoughts surrounding everything. 

I am definitely not going to spoil the ending. I will say that the ending leaves an incredibly weird feeling. 

I don't know whether to say I enjoyed this book or not. I did in the beginning, but now I'm not so sure.

One not-really-so-special spoiler is that every bunker contains a bible yet not a single character ever picks it up to actually read it. Linus, the main character, always acts like "I'm so desperate to do something...! I'll do anything... other than read the Bible." Whether you believe in the Bible or not, I just found it a wee bit ridiculous to imagine that you're trapped somewhere for an unthinkable amount of time and the ONE book inside, you don't even read out of boredom because you'd literally spend days doing absolutely nothing than read this one book. 

I want to discuss the ending, but don't want to spoil it for those of you who have not read it. As a result, I am going to Copy / Paste a bunch of text graphics, discuss the ending, and then copy/paste some more so that if you choose to comment, you won't have to be staring at whatever last sentence I wrote. Just scroll past all of it super fast and hope your eyes don't catch on to the text.

Here goes!

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I have no idea how to feel about this book. It makes you really question, "What would I do in this situation?" 

Now, I absolutely positively did NOT believe that every single person would die in the end. Yes, I was hopeful, but that was also because of a few errors my librarian told me. I think she was mixing up this book with another because she said that this book was the first one in a series (implying that it would not have an everyone-dies-ending; this book is not part of a series) and that whenever a person would disappear, a new one would soon replace them. That did not happen either. To be honest, maybe it's not the librarian who was not wrong but rather me with my faulty memory. I may be mixing up the time she was describing a different book but had a similar theme. 

I would describe this book as a thriller but ultimately a tragedy. I also heard Dystopian Lit could be used to describe it. 

It's an awfully nihilistic book, and I positively despise nihilistic things and feelings. My enjoyment from it rooted from the hope that Linus would survive or at least one of them would. When that hope disappeared, I didn't know how to react.

I think the ending implied that an insane Linus may have eaten Jenny's body before his death. 

This book as a whole leaves a very eery feeling. 

Now for some other reviews: Let's pick a favorite character! I'm torn between Jenny and Fred. Jenny's obvious why I like her: despite being a 9-year-old young girl, she is shockingly more mature than all of the adults and is a smart, kind thinker. There is nothing dislikable about Jenny and she was a truly remarkable girl who must have had a heck lot of optimism to keep from breaking down. I mean, she did, but not as much as everyone else did. Fred I subtly liked... He was honestly a good, strong, fearless man who just traveled down a bad path. In some ways, he was even stronger than Linus. If it wasn't for his heroin addiction, he could have been a much more admirable character. Despite being irritated by the other characters, he still would work to save their life, like saving Bird from the dog and Jenny from Bird.

I feel so bad for the prisoners in the book. It reminds me how lost we are without God's guidance. I'm thankful I have Him to lead me through life. 

still really taken aback how no one ever read the ONE book in the entire cellar, geez

I actually think that perhaps the author purposely did that because if he made a character read the Bible and THEN reject it, perhaps he was worried it would offend Bible believers 

If that's the case, then probably a wise choice of the author

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