*3.5 stars rounded up to 4I love survival stories so I was really excited for this one. I especially love survival stories when it's teenagers. There is just something so much more intense about it. They are kind of excited to not have adults telling them what to do, but they also need to learn not only to fend for themselves, but stay alive too. Seeing that I live in a place where the winters can be brutal, I can see this happening. Okay, maybe not to the extreme in this book, but who am I to doubt Mother Nature and her evil ways. I have gone without power in a blizzard before and I know how much it sucks, so I couldn't even imagine being stuck somewhere without knowing if your family is okay, in a horrible situation that looks like it has no end.This book is told from Scotty's perspective. We start off the book and he lets us know that he is telling us what happened, so we obviously know he survived the situation. (Either that or it's his ghost telling the story.) I liked him enough I guess. He was a typical boy. Average student, not a trouble maker, but not a saint either. He is good a t basketball and has a few close friends. He handles the situation pretty well. He is worried about his mom, he is worried about all of them, but he knows that they need to survive so even when things seem wrong to him he still does them or lets other people. In the end I loved how he makes the decisions he does. He is in fear for their lives and knows that something has to be done and he does what he has to and I think it was great to see that. Instead of just sitting around, trying to survive and hoping someone will find him, he does take action. Unfortunately, I don't think he would have if it weren't for something else that had happened, but I still think it was brave.There are seven of them stuck in the school and as the storm keeps pushing on, they get more and more desperate for food, warmth, and hope. They want to believe someone is coming for them, but the world outside those windows is very scary and it's not likely anyone is coming for them anytime soon. They listen to a battery powered radio which is their only connection to the world outside the walls of the buried school. Surprisingly they all kind of still group off, when you would think they would want to stay together more in such a tragic situation. I guess with them all being so different, and teenagers, they still just want to stick to their own groups. It's not to say they don't work together and interact with each other at times, but they never seemed like a group as a whole.This was a quick read about a group of teenagers making the best they can out of a bad situation. My only issue I had was that since the book is told more as a reflection of what happened, I never really was able to connect with the characters. I wanted to care what happened to them and hope they all made it out alive, but in all honestly I wasn't invested in them and I didn't care what happened to them. I did enjoy the book and I liked reading it, but the characters just fell flat for me. Overall it was a great book on survival in a snowpocalypse that kept me interested until the end.