Book Review: This is Where it Ends

Title: This is Where it Ends
Author: Marieke Nijkamp
Rating: 4.15 out of 5
Genre:  YA Realistic Fiction
Reviewer: Em

"Everyone has a reason to fear the boy with the gun."

This book is incredibly interesting. After you read the title and the inside cover, you already want to sit down and read it all they way through. Why else would I read it for five hours on a weekday, and then read another hour the next day to finish it? This story is told from four different perspectives, and the story happens over fifty-four minutes. It is about four seniors starting a new semester when a familiar face becomes a school shooter.

I know I say this a lot, but I love how this book is realistic. No one gets the perfect ending you find in fairy tales. Their emotions throughout the book and events describe how I'd imagine I would feel. Changing perspectives are also a thing that I adore. I love how you get to see how many characters are feeling and reacting to similar and different scenarios.

When you read this book, you get the feeling, although scary, on being there yourself, and you realize, anything this tragic could happen to you. These things don't just happen in books and on the news, and it gives you a sense of gratefulness for what you have already, and how lucky you really are.

Claire is outside of the school when it happens. She takes the position of a leader to try to help the people inside the school, including her brother. Although her parts weren't my favorite in the story, they were still good, and her hopelessness she felt in the story to save her brother is a feeling that everyone can relate to if they were in her situation.

Tomás is in a similar situation as Claire. He is outside of the auditorium when he hears shots being fired. He first thinks of his sister, Sylv, who is in the auditorium. He feels the desperate need to protect her, because as he says "I can't fail her again." He is probably my favorite character in the book because of his crafty and heroic personality. His love for his sister he had barely spoken to in a while is heartbreaking and adorable. He and his friend, Far, decide to go straight into action to save their classmates, no matter the danger it puts them in.

Autumn feels the strongest connection towards the shooter. She knows him, and can't believe it is him. She feels grief in knowing that the boy in front of her is not who he really is, and she has to deal with all the guilty looks thrown at her because she knows him. She wants to protect everyone, her classmates, Sylv, and the boy with the gun, but how can she?

Sylv has a certain fear that no one but her feels. She feels frozen in place. Even before he came to school that day with a gun, she had always been afraid of him, and now he was here. She wants to protect Autumn more than anyone else.

With the topic of this book so tragic, with emotions running right through it and the fear of all the characters thinking this could be the end, this book is a great read that I think everyone should try to make the time to read. You get an inside look on a fictional story on a topic you have heard too much about.

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Look at another one of Em's book reviews, Book Review: This is Where the World Ends!

"Janie and Micah have been secret best friends for a long time. However, in the beginning of the book, Micah wakes up in the hospital, not remembering anything after the day Janie moved across town. What happened to him? What happened to her? That's what he has to find out.

This book is told in both of their perspectives. Similar to my latest review, I'll Give You the Sun, Micah tells his story "after", when he can't remember what has happened, and Janie tells the story "before", when they are best friends. As Micah starts remembering the past, you start to learn about it too.

This book was definitely..." Read more