Most of all, I love the fluidity of the novel as it moved from one perspective to the next. It was the glistening green blossom of jealousy, and deeper down, beyond the place where the stem met the dirt, the parched and greedy roots: love. A sensation somehow totally new and totally familiar at once. I also thought the writing was beautiful and captured all the pain, want and uncertainty of being a teenager:Īnd as Anita watched Andy skip across the room, she finally felt it, rumbling like a bone-deep hunger she’d been ignoring for weeks. I guess the ultimate message - if one could be said to exist - is of existentialism and creating your own meaning, and it works well. We get to experience the coming "end of the world" through the eyes of both the religious and the non-believers, through the eyes of a virgin, and through the eyes of someone who sleeps around (and is proud of it), those with loving parents and those without. I liked how the characters were complex, sometimes unlikable and often misunderstood in each other's eyes. This book feels like more of an exploration and character study than the relaying of a message. It could have been so preachy, so cheesy, so contrived and yet it contains such a subtle and powerful honesty and rawness to it that these concepts are never overdone or forced down our throats.
This book dabbles constantly in philosophical thinking and asks us to consider the meaning of things (or lack of), religion, living for today, and the importance of pursuing what you love. I think there's something to be said about an author who can take some of the oldest, cliche ideas and create something new out of them. As the opening quote suggests, the strength of these characters is that it's easy to find little bits of ourselves in all of them - or so I believe. In the author's hands, the jock, the slut, the slacker and the aloof nerd become three-dimensional human beings, each with aspirations, desires and insecurities of their own. Wallach takes the traditional high school cliques and stereotypes and breathes humanity into them. and yet this book is so much more than the sum of its parts.įirstly, the characters are fantastic. It does have a lot of high school politics, and it is about the coming apocalypse. The cover is lovely and I think that might have something to do with why I was so drawn to this book, despite the description that seemed to be indirectly promising the equivalent of a bad high school drama meets cheesy action movie, complete with possible Armageddon-style asteroid collision. I didn't realise I was expecting this book to not be very good until it surprised me. You read them, and suddenly you're a little bit less alone in the world. They talk about things you'd always thought about, but that you didn't think anyone else had thought about. The best books, they don't talk about things you never thought about before.
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