This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp

I hope everyone had a great weekend! Mine was kind of nuts, seeing as we went full Christmas and we're not even done with the other house stuff we need to do. More on that later in the week, though, because today I have a review for This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp.

10:00 a.m.
The principal of Opportunity, Alabama's high school finishes her speech, welcoming the entire student body to a new semester and encouraging them to excel and achieve.

10:02 a.m.
The students get up to leave the auditorium for their next class.

10:03
The auditorium doors won't open.

10:05
Someone starts shooting.

Told over the span of 54 harrowing minutes from four different perspectives, terror reigns as one student's calculated revenge turns into the ultimate game of survival.

I've had this book on my Kindle for about two months now. I wanted to wait until it got closer to it's actual release date (January 5, 2016) before reading and reviewing it. Honestly, I'd actually forgotten the plot of this book, and to say that I was surprised would be an understatement. I finally got to it last week and it took me a few days before I could process what I felt for this book.

Since this is America, where apparently my cat could walk into a gun store and purchase whatever she wants, we've had about 335 mass shootings this year. 52 of those were school shootings. Working with kids, I'm constantly worried about what's going to happen to them when they leave our center. Sure, they live in a relatively safe suburb, but I'm sure that's what everyone thinks of their smallish city. I wish I could say that this book was one of those where I can't imagine what those people were feeling, but, again, as this is America, I understand it all too well.

This Is Where It Ends is told from several different perspectives: Claire, the runner; Tomás, the "bad" kid; Autumn, the sensitive dancer; and Sylv, her brave but damaged girlfriend. Three of these students are stuck in the school auditorium when a shooter begins his senseless, methodical murders, and one is on the outside, wanting in because family and friends are in there. Sprinkled throughout are shots from Twitter and a teacher's daughter's blog, giving us the experience of understanding all angles of this tragedy. We soon come to find that everyone in this narrative is connected in some way, and they all have a rather dark past with the shooter. That's what makes this whole mess so much worse: everyone is blaming themselves and not the shooter, because they think they've done something so harmful to him that he would turn a gun on his fellow students.

I liked a lot about this book, and it far outweighed the stuff I didn't like. I guess let's start with the disliking. Sometimes the characters were really one-dimensional. Having never been in a school shooting, I don't know exactly how I would react, but some of these kids were incredibly stone-faced and snarky when come face-to-face with the shooter. The secondary characters - those that we didn't really get a chance to know - were far more believable. For example, one girl watches her sister die in front of her, and she screams bloody murder (sorry), crumples to the ground, and then is in absolute shock for most of the novel. But the main characters stand up to the shooter, being sarcastic and don't seem to worry in the least about being shot.

What I liked most was the fast-pace of the novel. Sometimes when a novel is set within a certain time limit (this one was 52 minutes), it seems to drag on, leaving the reader wondering, okay, this scene has taken about an hour, but it's only been two minutes? This one really felt like everyone was moving at break-neck speed. I also really liked how real it all felt, because sometimes an author asks us to suspend reality for a few pages, but this one didn't. The cops didn't offer any special insight to the main characters, which left us in the dark, too. No one called from the auditorium and explained the plot to some other character. The reader is left wondering and waiting along with the other characters, hoping that so-and-so isn't really dead, that a sibling made it out before the shooter could see him or her. The stress and suspense is so real - and so all the time - that I had to take a few breaks, just to get my heart rate back to normal.

But now I get to the fun part! Sourcebooks Fire, the awesome publisher behind this book, is having a pre-order promotion for This Is Where It Ends. I'm going to let their super cute chalkboard picture tell the details, because it does it better than I could.

There are two ways to enter the giveaway:

1. If you pre-order a copy of This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp, submit your name, mailing address, email address, and order confirmation number via this Rafflecopter link.
2. If you have not pre-ordered a copy of This Is Where It Endsby Marieke Nijkamp, you may enter the giveaway by printing your name, mailing address, email address and the phrase "This Is Where It Ends" on a standard-size postcard and send to: Publicity, c/o Sourcebooks, Inc., 1935 Brookdale Rd., #139, Naperville, IL 60563.

So that's it! Easy peasy, right? But come on back the rest of this week, because I did some major reading over the weekend, and I still have two more reviews on hand. See you then!