The secret runners of New York by Matthew Reilley - book review

Have started with this book mid-December and finally managed to finish it this year! Considering that I heard about this book 4 years before, I forgot the reason why I had delayed reading this book for past 4 years!! Maybe I mistook it for a book about Marathoners!! But this one is not your typical Reilley thriller either. The first half of the book is like a Young Adult novel, detailing the travails of the narrator, a girl called Skye, who had shifted to Uptown New York along with her twin brother, accompanying their newly married mother and their super rich stepfather. Both the kids are sent to a school that is specifically meant for the Richie rich of the society and is filled with kids whose attitudes are borderline monstrosity and are psychologically disturbed to say the least. In other words, how they depict such kids on chick flick movies like Cruel Intentions or Mean Girls etc. There is a cliched bunch of characters who are exceptionally decent in that bunch, who invariably end up ganging up with the protagonist and adding to the list of cliches, the twin brother of the narrator falling for one from the meanie bunch and the girl herself falling for the boyfriend of the queen bee of the meanie bunch. In fact, the story goes chapter by chapter, almost like taking attendance of her whole class, detailing the characters of every student in the class, making it quite tedious a read. 

By the time, the title begins to make sense, you are probably wondering whether it was written by Reilley or ghost written by someone else!! And the second half answers that conundrum where the action shifts from first gear to superfast , where the leader of the meanies opens a portal and invites her select bunch of friends for a quick run (and hence the title!!) In the meanwhile, there is news about a Gamma cloud burst which may potentially destroy human civilization and most of the earth’s population. When they make their secret run across the portal, the group realize that they are visiting the future state of New York, post the apocalyptic gamma burst, several decades into the future. At the beginning of the story, we are introduced to an abduction and murder of a girl, which is also revealed during the mysteries surrounding the portal. The second half is typically Matthew Reilley, with its breakneck pace, gruesome villains ending with gory death and the good guys surviving everything thrown at them. It has an interesting take on time travel for never have it been made so dumbed down or simplified. It is as simple as open a door, visit the future, come back and close the door!! There is another interesting take on how the gamma bursts target all “sane” people and people with some immune deficiency, while the psychotic people, jailed prisoners and other people with that specific immunity gained by taking good healthy food survive that calamity!! Felt it was a lazy way of cooking up a world full of risky characters, chasing the narrator and her friend, for usually this loony lot will be described and chiseled in detail on his other books.

Overall, it felt like a jumpy ride that dealt with 2 diametrically opposite genres on the same book.