A review by onthesamepage
We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson

dark emotional slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Dreams are hopeful because they exist as pure possibility. Unlike memories, which are fossils, long dead and buried deep.

This is such a bleak read, and I'm having a difficult time reviewing it. Looking at it objectively, this is a good book. The writing is stellar, the characters are nuanced, and it tackles some difficult topics. But I think the sheer multitude of issues this book is trying to tackle caused a disconnect for me.

It probably doesn't help that, within the first few pages of the book, Henry says the following two things: 
Out in the world, crawling in a field at the edge of some bullshit town with a name like Shoshoni or Medicine Bow, is an ant.
and 
I’m telling you that tomorrow— January 29, 2016— you can kiss your Chipotle- eating, Frappuccino- drinking, fat ass good- bye.

Both lines got my hackles up; one feels like a dig at Indigenous people, and the other is lowkey fatphobic. And I think I just never got over that first impression. Because while I understand that Henry is suffering and going through a lot, that doesn't excuse him from insulting and belittling other people.

There were also a lot of contradictions in the way certain characters behaved that were difficult for me to rationalize. We have Henry's brother, who bullies him just as much at home as he gets bullied in school, including punches to the stomach, but I'm supposed to believe that he's suddenly protective of Henry when bullies at school assault him? Is this one of those, "I'm family so that makes it okay" things? I understand that all of the characters in this book are messed up, but I was getting whiplash from how quickly they went from one way of acting to a different one. 

The same goes for Henry himself--
the entire plot revolves around him getting abducted by aliens, who tell him the world will end and he can save everyone by pressing a red button. Except he doesn't want to, because the world sucks. And the world keeps sucking, because the good things that happen to him are by far outweighed by the bad. And yet somehow, I was supposed to believe that by the end of the book, after countless traumatic incidents and a few days of therapy, Henry feels differently about the world, and I just didn't buy it.


That doesn't mean there was nothing good about the book. The inclusion of different doomsday scenarios was pretty interesting and amusing. I actually liked most of the characters, and how they felt like actual, flawed, human beings. There's a lot of depth to the relationships, and I appreciated the way those evolved and how the characters grew. I can definitely understand why this book had such a huge impact on so many people, it just wasn't the right book for me.
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