Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.38 AVERAGE
3.38 AVERAGE
For a young adult book, I can't believe how much depth this book had. A beautiful coming of age story with a tragic plot line. It was written pre pandemic but someone is even more fitting after 2020
All of these characters were fantastic. Loved the multiple POVs and their interactions with each other.
Very well written. Terrifying in an existential way, but when don’t I struggle with existentialism.
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
2.5 ⭐️: puhhh… A thought provoking premise with humanity being informed that an asteroid is headed towards earth with a 66% chance of hitting it and ending life. What would you do with 60 days left to live? We get to follow along a group of teenagers / young adults as they navigate those last weeks. The book felt lengthy at times and I skimmed more than read many pages and yet, I feel like the premise will stick with me for a while… For me the ending was not satisfactory especially for one of the characters.
I’m barely giving this book 1 star (but just think of it as a quarter of a star) purely because the premise was at least interesting enough to get me to buy it. So good job on that.
However, everything else about this book was not good. First of all, it was tedious. It just kept on going and going and going and all i wanted to do was throw it across the room and forget about it, but i have a problem with giving up on books i have started.
But besides the fact that I found it mostly boring, the book and this author is so casually sexist, racist, and homophobic that it was basically unbearable. This was the main reason of why I hated this book the entire time I put myself through the awfulness of reading it.
The book was so misogynistic and sexist, and these comments and phrases were just so casually (and also blatantly) thrown in all. the. time. it was exhausting and disgusting to read about. The author, at first, seems to be trying to be some sort of feminist, but he consistently has his male characters shame and objectify the women in the story with no sort of consequences or even an explanation on why this is gross. Nope. Nothing. It was a horrible experience.
Wallach also throws in a handful of homophobic and transphobic comments (ex. one of the characters calls a trans guy “Jess-who-used-to-be-a-girl” and only recognizes him as that)
Anyways, my favorite part is when they discovered that Anita isn’t just a shy, smart girl but that she actually has a personality! No way! That plot twist. . .
Honestly, if you’re into the whole apocalyptic world with teenagers doing a bunch of dumb stuff, read the Gone series over this. (It took a whole lot out of me to write that.)
Overall, this book holds a special place of hatred from me and I will be burning it.
However, everything else about this book was not good. First of all, it was tedious. It just kept on going and going and going and all i wanted to do was throw it across the room and forget about it, but i have a problem with giving up on books i have started.
But besides the fact that I found it mostly boring, the book and this author is so casually sexist, racist, and homophobic that it was basically unbearable. This was the main reason of why I hated this book the entire time I put myself through the awfulness of reading it.
The book was so misogynistic and sexist, and these comments and phrases were just so casually (and also blatantly) thrown in all. the. time. it was exhausting and disgusting to read about. The author, at first, seems to be trying to be some sort of feminist, but he consistently has his male characters shame and objectify the women in the story with no sort of consequences or even an explanation on why this is gross. Nope. Nothing. It was a horrible experience.
Wallach also throws in a handful of homophobic and transphobic comments (ex. one of the characters calls a trans guy “Jess-who-used-to-be-a-girl” and only recognizes him as that)
Anyways, my favorite part is when they discovered that Anita isn’t just a shy, smart girl but that she actually has a personality! No way! That plot twist. . .
Honestly, if you’re into the whole apocalyptic world with teenagers doing a bunch of dumb stuff, read the Gone series over this. (It took a whole lot out of me to write that.)
Overall, this book holds a special place of hatred from me and I will be burning it.
"The best books, they don't talk about things you never thought about before. They talk about things you'd always thought about, but that you didn't think anyone else had thought about. You read them, and suddenly you're a little bit less alone in the world. You're part of this cosmic community of people who've thought about this thing, whatever it happens to be....."
ARC received from: Netgalley
Rating: 4*
Cover: Yay
POV: 3rd Person but told from multiple POV
Review: I don't read that many Young Adult novels and the ones I do tend to be Dystopian-related. However, don't be fooled by the summary, whilst it talks of an asteroid heading straight to earth and possible mass-destruction, this book is anything but a Dystopian-world. It's about our world, or rather the familiar world of American teenagers, and how possible impending death causes four of them to break out of their social circles and form new bonds with people they normally wouldn't give a second glance to.
You're probably thinking that exploring the world of messed up teenagers mixing it up with their playground enemies is nothing new but Tommy Wallach brings something special to the genre: the ability to write. He gets his characters to say some pretty prosaic, insightful things whilst still sounding like teenagers and he very quickly draws you into the world of these four characters and gets you to care about them.
The open-ended ending was something of beauty as well. I wouldn't have had it any other way.
I really hope this book makes it on the 2015 Goodreads award for Best Young Adult fiction as I will definitely be voting for it. Can't wait to see what the author writes next.
Full review @ Love's A State Of Mind
It may be time to take a break from the post-apocalyptic reads. Or the teen reads. Or the perfectly satisfactory reads. I liked this perfectly well. There's nothing wrong with it, it just didn't excite me. I think I would have enjoyed it more, had the story not been told through the eyes of the revolving 4 characters. By jumping from one character to the next, I never made a real connection with any of them. I also found Wallach's handling of the element of time (which is a critical element of the story) to be haphazard, which distracted me from the story he was trying to tell. But I loved that he ends the story before Ardor hits (or doesn't hit), because the whole point of the story has nothing to do with whether or not life as we know it comes to an end. It's how we face the probability of imminent disaster that's the point and that is brilliant.
emotional
hopeful
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
In Seattle, four teens are slogging through the mess that is high school when that bright star in the sky is confirmed to be an asteroid that has a good chance of colliding with earth.
Begin apocalypse readiness.
Each of these four characters have their issues, of course. There's the perfect-girl-gone-bad, the stoner musician, the artsy girl who sleeps around, the basketball star with a heart of gold - while they all slip around inside their stereotypes, they definitely still are stereotypes, which is a bit of a bummer. However, I will say, the writing in this book (while FULL of swears, full), is pretty amazing. I like that as we go from chapter to chapter we switch characters and go back in time JUST a bit, seeing the previous scene from a different point of view. That was awesome. As you can imagine, it's a dark story - with that existential countdown looming over you head and its interesting to see how differently people handle the dread of coming doom - some parts are pretty violent. While there are no actual graphic sex scenes, sex is a huge component of these teens' lives - how often they've had it, will they have it before the end of the world, can they take it from someone by force or give it as a gift? All of that. Definitely a treatise on teenage sexuality, and I can't say I always agreed with the message but every once and a while someone would hit on an idea that rang true to me.
I REALLY liked the ending, surprisingly. For a minute I felt a bit cheated but all the text in the last few chapters felt so purposeful, so real and like it was trying to get even ME to think a bit deeper, that it made complete sense. One quote at the end felt particularly poignant and I'm still thinking about it, about the idea that we just never get to pick what happens to us no matter WHAT, come asteroid or cancer or car accident or one true love. What we get to actually pick from the universe is so small that when we've found something good, we'd better hold on tight.
Begin apocalypse readiness.
Each of these four characters have their issues, of course. There's the perfect-girl-gone-bad, the stoner musician, the artsy girl who sleeps around, the basketball star with a heart of gold - while they all slip around inside their stereotypes, they definitely still are stereotypes, which is a bit of a bummer. However, I will say, the writing in this book (while FULL of swears, full), is pretty amazing. I like that as we go from chapter to chapter we switch characters and go back in time JUST a bit, seeing the previous scene from a different point of view. That was awesome. As you can imagine, it's a dark story - with that existential countdown looming over you head and its interesting to see how differently people handle the dread of coming doom - some parts are pretty violent. While there are no actual graphic sex scenes, sex is a huge component of these teens' lives - how often they've had it, will they have it before the end of the world, can they take it from someone by force or give it as a gift? All of that. Definitely a treatise on teenage sexuality, and I can't say I always agreed with the message but every once and a while someone would hit on an idea that rang true to me.
I REALLY liked the ending, surprisingly. For a minute I felt a bit cheated but all the text in the last few chapters felt so purposeful, so real and like it was trying to get even ME to think a bit deeper, that it made complete sense. One quote at the end felt particularly poignant and I'm still thinking about it, about the idea that we just never get to pick what happens to us no matter WHAT, come asteroid or cancer or car accident or one true love. What we get to actually pick from the universe is so small that when we've found something good, we'd better hold on tight.