Rhian W. (couchsloth) reviewed on 1/7/2015

Helpful Score: 4

I am thoroughly disappointed with this book. It's from the perspective of a tweenager in middle school during the end of the world. It sounds like a good idea- a coming of age story around an international crisis- but its execution is majorly flawed. The main character speaks in unintended prose and every paragraph ends with an overdramatic and unnecessary overgeneralization about life. For example: "My mother waited in car at the curb until the bus arrived, convinced that danger, like potatoes, breeds in the dark." Potatoes. What. And another melodramatic observation: "Grown under similar conditions, we had become very different, two specimens of girlhood, now diverging." At the end of every paragraph you will find the 12 year old philosopher making another angsty claim about nothing at all. The book is supposed to be creepy, but I found myself laughing at the botched construction of the sentences. "And how miraculous it would soon seem that I was once a happier girl, less lonely and less shy. But I guess every bygone era takes on a shade of myth. With a little persuasion, any familiar thing can turn abnormal in the mind." There's too much foreshadowing, too. 99% of the sentences are either philosophical musings provoked by nothing or foreshadowing for events that either don't happen or are too small to require foreshadowing. The only reason I made it through the book was the hope that it would get better, which it didn't. By the time I was halfway through, I figured that I might as well finish it seeing as how I had come so far. Nothing happens in the book. I wanted to give a fair warning to anyone considering reading this book. Don't.

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