Tuesday, December 21, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: At the End of Everything by Marieke Nijkamp

 




Full Disclosure:  This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on January 4, 2022 in exchange for a potential review.  I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.    

At the End of Everything is a YA Science Fiction novel by author Marieke Nijkamp, and well, it's very much a book written during the COVID Pandemic.  The book features a group of teens at a juvenile detention center - a group of teens who are more misfits for not fitting in with society than actually being deserving of imprisonment - who are abandoned their when a deadly plague strikes society.  If the parallels to what happened during the COVID Pandemic weren't apparent, the occasional interludes with news articles are very blatantly almost ripped from our own headlines.  

And while the resulting story isn't very original (it could go one of two ways, and it does indeed largely go that way), it works very well at hitting on its biggest theme - how society cruelly abandons those who don't fit in, forcing those people to fight for themselves, sometimes successfully, other times...not so much.  The book's three main protagonists - non-binary castout Emerson, mute girl Logan, and leader Grace - are really well done, as they struggle with their situation, trying to help each other and themselves out, and find a way to do more than just survive.  The result is a story that is far from optimistic, with an ending that is bittersweet, but works pretty well at hitting its readers' hearts, so they learn the lessons its trying to teach. 

Trigger Warning:  Dead-Naming/Misgendering (only in the first few chapters), Ableism, references to abuse - physical and sexual - and transphobia.  For the most part, the worst of these behaviors are in flashbacks and only implied, as they form parts of characters' backstories, and not their present problems.  

---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
The teenage residents of Hope Juvenile Treatment Center know better to think that the center's name is accurate - no one there really wants to provide treatment or hope to the teens imprisoned there, teens who aren't criminals as much as misunderstood.  

For Logan, the center is only bearable because her other half, her twin Leah is with her - as Leah is the only one who understands her, with or without sign language.  

For Emerson, a non-binary teen who ran away from his religious family after they cast them out, the center is just the latest place that doesn't understand them.  

For Grace, a girl who wouldn't let injustice go just because it was being perpetrated by a privileged white boy, the center is just another unjust place to survive.  

But then one day the guards, staff, and warden of the Treatment Center disappear, and a trip outside results in the discovery that the teens have been abandoned in the wake oh a deadly world spanning plague, resulting in many of the teens deciding to flee the Center in search of something better. 

But for Grace, Emerson and Logan and others, there is nowhere else to go, and so they decide to stay and try to survive.  But do they really have a chance of doing so when no further aid or supplies are coming, and the plague begins to hit some of the teens themselves?  
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In case it wasn't obvious, At the End of Everything is very much a story built upon the events of the COVID-19 Pandemic, especially in how its effects were felt by disadvantaged peoples - peoples who were imprisoned (who suffered greatly without much care from the general population) as well as those from disadvantaged groups without money and resources to give them access to care.  And so here we have a group of teens, all of whom were thrown into Hope due to unjust circumstances that resulted in them "acting out", whether that be Grace assaulting a privileged boy implied to abuse/rape other girls or Logan and her sister setting on fire a building supposedly meant to be a shelter for kids that was instead abusing them.  And then of course there's Emerson, a non-binary teen from a religious family that cast him out and then wouldn't take him back when he ran away, resulting in their imprisonment.  

These are a group of teens who are cast out by society for their differences*, without regards to their own individual needs whatsoever.  Each struggles with their own issues - Grace with finding something other than simply surviving and leading in an unjust world; Logan with being separated from her lifeline in her sister, without anyone who can understand the only language she can "speak"; Emerson with knowing they're non-binary despite the religious foundation of their life failing to allow for that possibility - and is now forced by the plague to struggle just to survive together.  And none of them deserve the abandonment that occurs to them, forcing them to do desperate things to survive on their own, because no help is seemingly coming.  

*As noted by the author in an afterword, individuals who aren't White who face these situations are treated even worse by society, but the author stated that she didn't make any of her protagonists non-white because she didn't feel that was her story as a white author she could tell, and instead the author includes a number of references to other books where readers can find those stories.  I appreciate the afterword and references, but I do wish the author had tried to tell that in part in this story, using assistance from others to make sure she wrote the "other" in a proper way.*  

Stories like this tend to go in one of two ways - they can go all Lord of the Flies and feature the teens forming a monstrous society that eats itself or they can feature the teens trying to work together to survive, and this book goes for that last one, because unlike the classic novel, real kids like these aren't cruel at heart.  And Nijkamp makes this story work by making each of our three main protagonists, who the story jumps around between from chapter to chapter, as well as the other protagonists, well, real, in their own different ways.  And so they act real when they first face being abandoned, sometimes acting out on their own, and facing new circumstances, like what seems like a betrayal, in the realistic but struggling way that you'd imagine.  

Again, none of this original, and it's not even a little bit subtle, but it works for how real Nijkamp portrays things, leading up to the book's ending, which is very bittersweet and not at all happy for all of our characters.  Because well, such an ending wouldn't be real or fitting, and Nijkamp doesn't try to force it onto this story.  The result is a book well worth reading for young adults and adults who could really use its lessons, even if there isn't really much here unique or otherwise interesting on offer.  


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