Variant by Robison Wells

This is a creepy little number. Vaguely reminiscent of something my daughter handed me some time ago called Idlewild by Nick Sagan. In all fairness, I suppose the similarity lies primarily in the boarding school setting, and, of course, the teenage hero - which is pretty much a given in YA stuff. In that one, wealthy families sent their troublesome teenagers off to school where they were kept wired into a virtual reality system a la The Matrix. Here young loners from the foster care system are lured into the school where there are no teachers, the students handle everything from janitorial work to teaching, being sent to detention is a death sentence, and no one gets to leave - ever.

Part of it is degeneration and recreation of a social system under these circumstances with these subjects. They don't sink quite as far as the boys in Lord of the Flies, but they do have many of the conveniences of modern life, including Big Brother who is watching and listening constantly. The rest is the ferreting out of the techno-conspiracy by our determined hero, and his efforts to convince his apparent peers that there really is a problem.

There is a good bit of unnecessary implausibility, but this is a first effort, and he certainly has the potential to improve.