At The End Of Everything by Marieke Nijkamp ARC Review

 

Title: At the End of Everything
Author: Marieke Nijkamp 
Publish Date: January 25th, 2022
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Source: Huge thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC for review!

The Hope Juvenile Treatment Center is ironically named. No one has hope for the delinquent teenagers who have been exiled there; the world barely acknowledges that they exist.

Then the guards at Hope start acting strange. And one day...they don't show up. But when the teens band together to make a break from the facility, they encounter soldiers outside the gates. There's a rapidly spreading infectious disease outside, and no one can leave their houses or travel without a permit. Which means that they're stuck at Hope. And this time, no one is watching out for them at all.

As supplies quickly dwindle and a deadly plague tears through their ranks, the group has to decide whom among them they can trust and figure out how they can survive in a world that has never wanted them in the first place.

Penelope's Review

At the End of Everything is told through the point of view of three main characters - Grace, Emerson, and Logan. It follows a group of teenagers left behind in a juvenile detention centre during a comeback of the plague that is shutting the world down. This book was basically everything that's happened with Covid, just a worse version I suppose. It didn't  bother me in the slightest to be reading this during the current pandemic, as I've seen some reviews mention. I took this for what it was - a book about a deadly disease and how these teenagers handled being on their own. 

Unfortunately I didn't feel I could connect with any of the characters - despite being told from 3 people's point of view, there were several other characters that made up this story and it was alot to keep track of. Sometimes I actually found myself confused as to who's section I was reading, and being unable to tell them apart. As a result, it didn't really matter much who lived or died if you know what I mean? It just seemed to be missing that depth. 

It's also worth mentioning that this book is very slow going. There was never really a point where I was like "I need to know what happens next, turn the page!". I thought maybe there would be a slight thriller aspect to it (and when we had confrontation with the guards at the beginning, I thought that was the theme the book would follow) but alas, it did not. This definitely takes more of a slow, humanistic, emotional approach to telling the story. Which I'm sure some will absolutely love! I just prefer things a little faster-paced. 

The ending was good, and sort of turned out to be what I expected. Overall, it was a pretty good book but not my favourite. I think it will definitely suit the tastes of many, it just didn't happen to do it for me.

Rating: 3/5 Devils!