This Is Where It Ends
by Marieke Nijkamp
Expected Publication: January 5, 2016
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
10:00 a.m.
The
principal of Opportunity, Alabama's high school finishes her speech, welcoming
the entire student body to a new semester and encouraging them to excel and
achieve.
10:02 a.m.
The
students get up to leave the auditorium for their next class.
10:03
The
auditorium doors won't open.
10:05
Someone
starts shooting.
Told
over the span of 54 harrowing minutes from four different perspectives, terror
reigns as one student's calculated revenge turns into the ultimate game of
survival.
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It seems that lately, school shootings are becoming
more frequent in our society. This Is Where It Ends gives the reader a
very disturbing ‘eye-witness’ fictional account of one school shooting through
the eyes of four very diverse high school students. Although this is a very
impactful read, it does have its issues that I just couldn't get past.
For starters, I found the lack of timely police
presence unrealistic, especially in an age when most teenagers have
cellphones. This story takes place in a
small town, yet it seemed to take forever for any help to arrive. Next, the author threw in some random
twitter-like messages and what looked like blog posts throughout the story and
I felt they did not contribute any value to the actual story and made the story
choppy. Added in the mix, there were
random gray boxes that I felt served no purpose whatsoever except to take up
space kept appearing after every twitter-like message. Since I was reading an eARC, I’m not sure if
the published work will have actual pictures instead of these annoying boxes,
but in its current state I felt as though it prevented a smooth reading
experience. And last but not least, there was some dialogue in Spanish thrown
in. As a reader who does not know a
second language, I found this inconsiderate.
Yes, I could have gone and performed a Google translate, but why should
I? It would have been a nice touch if
the author would have translated for the reader or perhaps just kept it all in
English.
I applaud the author for presenting very diverse
characters in the story, but I felt they fell flat and were under-developed. Although there are four main characters, the story
has many minor characters and it was difficult to keep up with them. Although the main character’s flashbacks
provided some insight on what makes them ‘tick’, at times it came across as a ‘poor
me’ mentality. Don’t get me wrong, I
really felt for some of the characters, but some of them just came off as your
typical whiny teenager and I just couldn't feel that sorry for them.
For the most part, this was an okay story that was
intense and despite the minor nuisances kept me on the edge of my seat most of
the time. It’s a very traumatic but
timely story that has a lot of potential but unfortunately fell short of the
high expectations I had for it.
2 stars
Marieke
Nijkamp a storyteller, dreamer, globe-trotter, and diversity advocate. She
holds degrees in philosophy, history, and medieval studies.
Her
debut YA novel THIS IS WHERE IT ENDS will be out from Sourcebooks Fire in 2016.
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