This Is Where It Ends Audio CD – Unabridged, December 1, 2016

In the past few years, I’ve added a lot of YA books to my to-read list that I doubt I’ll get to them all. One of the advantages of having a to-read list at Goodreads is that I receive notifications whenever there’s a discount on the eBook edition of one of those books. And that’s how This Is Where It Ends made it to my Kindle.I’d seen this book before, and even before reading the book description, the striking cover image clearly indicates it’s a story about a school shooting. I’ll even interpret the varied color pieces of chalk to mean that these events are going to be viewed through different lenses.I mostly read YA contemporary fantasy, but every now and then I’ll pick up a straightforward YA contemporary, particularly if it deals with protagonists facing some kind of struggle with their identity. That’s what I like most about YA—the characters are teens, so they’re still in formation and making mistakes with the opportunity to learn about themselves. Reading a book about a school shooting is a little bit outside my comfort zone, mostly because being a high school teacher, the thought of one occurring where I work terrifies me. Unfortunately, no one knows what might trigger someone to pull that trigger, so all we can be is vigilant and aware of the people around us.Nijkamp’s book tackles this head on by telling the story from four points of view, in various places around the school during the shooting, each with a different relationship to the shooter. Normally, I’m not the biggest fan of stories told from more than two first-person narrators, but here it works exceptionally well because of the immediacy of the situation and these characters’ relationships with each other and the shooter. It also helps that not all four of them are in the same place, so the story can be told both inside and outside the school’s auditorium when the shooter takes the school hostage.Let’s take attendance. Our shooter is Tyler, holding most of the school hostage in the auditorium. Our four narrators are: (1) Autumn, Ty’s sister and aspiring dancer, who wants to audition for Julliard. (2) Sylv, Autumn’s girlfriend, who had a past incident with Tyler. (3) Tomás, Sylv’s brother, who is a kind of class clown/troublemaker and once had a run-in with Tyler. (4) Claire, school track star and Tyler’s ex-girlfriend. There are also a few other characters we see via those narrators, such as Claire’s teammate Chris, Tomás’s partner-in-crime Fareed, and Claire’s younger brother Matt.The book starts with Autumn and Sylv in the auditorium along with most of the school, as the principal is delivering her start-of-semester speech. But Tomás and Fareed are breaking into the principal’s office, and Claire and Chris are outside with the track team. The events of the story take place over the course of an hour, with each chapter covering a few minutes of narration from each of the four narrators. Once I got used to the format, I found it fascinating and meticulously detailed. The characters’ actions and reactions were believable, and when each provided some backstory, I read it like their lives flashing before their eyes as often happens when someone is faced with their own mortality. At times, it was gripping.But once or twice, I found some details that didn’t seem real for me. Maybe they come from years and years working in a public school, but why was almost everyone in the auditorium? What about office secretaries, custodial staff, cafeteria staff, and so on? A security guard is mentioned and shown, but what about everyone else who wouldn’t have a reason to be in the assembly? Of course, this is a minor issue—and only one that someone who works in a school might have—but it made me wonder how Tyler’s actions before he started shooting in the auditorium would have played out in a realistic setting. And then it made me hope that no school ever has to find out.By the end of the book, I was genuinely attached to these characters and praying for their safety, and I got a little choked up when some things happened to some of them. I will not spoil further by stating whether everyone lives or not. I applaud the bravery of them when faced with the challenging situation, just as I would applaud any such student heroes in a real school shooting.The ending and epilogue don’t fully provide closure to the book, but that’s fine. In reality, you don’t always get closure, and victims of mass shootings sadly have to live with the memory of the event. Thus, the book almost feels like the memoirs of these four characters recounting the event rather than a piece of fiction. It’s visceral, and the themes of community, individual bravery, and societal problems (mass shootings, abuse, and others) are clear.Despite only a few plot contrivances in the story’s set-up, the structure of the book and its different narrators are compelling. I wish stories of mass shootings, particularly ones in schools, would remain fictional where it can come to an end, but for those impacted in reality, the grief and memories don’t end as quickly. This Is Where It Ends deserves FOUR AND A HALF STARS.

Fine for YA, not overly graphic minus 1-2 scenes. Definitely traumatizing if you have a history with shootings. Too much young love side stories and the texts/tweet message style threw me off, took away from the story with the online usernames to decipher. Not one I’d likely recommend / reread

An entire student body is trapped in a high school auditorium. One teenage boy has a gun. Fifty-four minutes of terror narrated from four different points of view. This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp is so relevant to our current day and age, stirring thoughts of terrorism and violence we so often hear about while watching the national news headlines. I dare say many people will recognize this story to be their worst nightmare laid out on page. This book is heart-stopping young adult fiction that reads more like a thriller, and it's wholly terrifying.Nijkamp calls to mind the fear victims must have felt at Columbine High School, at Century 16 in Aurora, Colorado, at an office party in San Bernardino, at the Bataclan Theatre in Paris as the events of the morning progress at Opportunity High School. What would drive Tyler Browne to corner an entire school body in the auditorium, to right all of the wrongs, the injustices, he perceives to have been done to him? Underneath the violence of this story, the author combines points of view from Claire, Autumn, Sylvia and Tomás, four individuals who have a history with the shooter, to help us understand the "why" behind his actions – something many of us are often left wondering when we hear about real life events on the news.Nijkamp wholeheartedly captured my attention from the get-go. The pacing of This is Where it Ends moves quickly. It’s full of non-stop action, with most of the characters facing mortal danger as the story plays out. Oh my goodness – did I ever feel anxious with this book! In fact, my adrenaline spiked like crazy as I was reading. I knew this thriller would be difficult for me to read, but I didn’t anticipate how hard it would be for me to put this book down before I had finished! Nijkamp tempers the violence in this novel with backstory, timing the reveal of pertinent information about primary and secondary characters as the violence plays out.Although the span of this book takes place over fifty-four minutes, Nijkamp does a fantastic job of crafting a thought-provoking story. It’s not just about the violence – there’s more to it than that. It’s about perception of injustice. Bullying. Loneliness. Parental issues. I felt a varied range of emotions while reading This is Where it Ends – anger, sadness, relief, empathy, anxiety, shock – I even cried tears. Many of you know that I’ve reviewed novels for a while now. I’m aware readers can sometimes be fickle about a novel with difficult subject matter, but I was personally left with a sense of awe. Marieke Nijkamp grabs a solid 5-star rating for This is Where it Ends and earns the first spot on my list of 2016 favorites!

First the plus - the author is not devoid of talent and her writing style is not horrible. I can imagine her writing a fairly decent navel-gazing teen romance. However her style does not lend itself to the kind of thriller this purports to be. There are way too many POVs, all of which are virtually distinguishable (I had to keep flipping back to find out which character was narrating)- none of the characters are well developed and it's hard to care about any of them. The whole Clare storyline needs to be cut I got tired of her endless self-absorption and she seemed an unlikely girlfriend for Tyler. One set of people working to rescue those trapped in the auditorium would be sufficient. Not even Tyler the shooter is given any depth, I really had very little idea what kind of statement he was trying to make and I found it hard to care about victims either, as they tend to be introduced only to be executed seconds later. The pacing absolutely horrible - the author really can't write action scenes - the shooter can hardly pull the trigger within the narrative shifting to a flashback of some utterly generic teen drama which destroys all possible tension. There is no real sense of this being a life and death situation -( one character een takes the chance to make a date with a girl he likes while rescuing hostages!) The time taken for a response by emergency services is completely unbelievable given - as one character notes - the number of people with cellphones who can call 911) and I didn't believe for one second that Tyler would fail to notice the noise of people breaking into the auditorium or far that matter that people had started to sneak out. The author needs a few writing classes before attempting to write anything else - she has way way too many characters/subplots/flashbacks none of wh ich are remotely original or interesting and they needed to be culled - after the first few chapters I was rooting for the shooter. Seriously not worth what I paid for it a another overrated novel hyped to the skies by unscrupulous publishers.

This had the potential to be a lot better than it actually was.What I was hoping for: dark, reality-fiction that socked me to the stomach with flawed characters I could really root for.What I got: a kind of navel-gazey story about brothers and sisters.I think I’m going to stop reading high-school-shooting books. I guess I’m never going to be able to get behind a book that treats the ownership of guns as something, like, completely normal. Because, for me, it’s not normal to have a gun in your house! I would be freaked out if I ever ended up within a hundred metre radius of a gun. It’s a gun! A metal tube that shoots bullets and is designed to kill stuff! They use them in wars! It’s like keeping an IED in your back garden!I had the same thing with Hate List. It weirds me out when books treat something like a high school shooting as ‘something that happens’. I mean, I realise they DO happen in America, and they should absolutely be written about, in the same way that rape and abuse are written about, but I will never get my head around the tone this book (and others) use. Characters weren’t shocked or freaked out that a guy had brought a gun into school and had started killing people. They were terrified, yes. But not shocked.Because, well ... yes. If you live in a society where you can literally go into a supermarket and buy A GUN, then you will also find yourself living in a society where crazy people use those guns to kill other people.Christ knows, Britain is no Utopia - we’re finding plenty of ways to screw up our own country, thanks very much - but I don’t think Americans (particularly American authors and publishers) realise how weird it sounds.Going into a supermarket. And buying a gun.So, no. No more high-school-shooting books for me.As for the rest of the book, I didn’t really feel it lived up to my hopes. The characters were bland. I didn’t really manage to get behind them and ultimately I didn’t really care if they got bumped off or not. The lesbian couple, who I had great hopes for, were so tepid it just made me roll my eyes. The track star and her friend/love interest were included for no good reason I could see. There was an interesting delve into the dynamics of family relationships, specifically into the relationships between brothers and sisters, but it needed some interesting characters to bring it to life.The plot was dull. The kids in the auditorium just sat there while the mad guy picked them off, one by one. There were no mad escape attempts, no tension (astonishingly, for a book about a mass-murder).And that ending was cringingly cheesey.I’ve read a couple of reviews that say this book is too scary for younger readers. I wouldn’t necessarily agree. High school shootings do happen and I do think it’s right that it gets written about. But with this book, I’d have more concerns about younger teens slipping into a Boredom Coma than being kept up at night, sleepless and terrified.

This was such a gripping, yet harrowing story. It’s fast-paced and the POV switches regularly between various characters as the horrible events unfold.Initially we are introduced to each character as they start what is supposed to be just another normal first day of a new semester. We learn a little of their hopes for the future, some memories from the past, and how their lives are all interwoven. Because there isn’t much build up to the shooting (which is great from a pacing/atmosphere perspective) it can be a little confusing getting to grips with the various relationships between all the characters and how they’re linked, but this got easier to remember as the story progressed.The story is, as expected, unsettling, brutal and terrifying. The shooter is completely remorseless in his actions and that leaves no character safe – not even those closest to him. Through flashbacks from the various characters, we learn a little of the shooters background and what has led to him reaching the decision to attack the school.It should come as no surprise that a lot of people die in this book, many of them characters that you grow close to through the narration, and all of them undeserving of their fate. They’re terrorised in the most brutal way by someone they know – and for some of them, someone they loved and trusted – and for things that aren’t their fault. But there is more than death here, we see some spectacular displays of bravery, of care and selflessness, and of love that there is so much emotion packed into a short book. It was incredibly hard-hitting.I would definitely recommend this. It’s an incredibly real story and something that could easily happen in so many schools – which is as terrifying as it is heart-breaking.My only complaint was that there wasn’t much coverage of what happened after the incident, and I would’ve liked to see a little more of the outcome and how the survivors had adjusted.

To me this is a concept that is unique to YA books and as soon a I read the synopsis for this book I knew I had to read it. Living in the UK gun crime is quite rare and I only seemed to read about what was happening in America, but this book really makes you think about the experiences people go through either being in the middle of a school shooting or the grief of knowing someone who has.It sounds weird, even to me, to love a book about a school shooting but somehow I do. From the beginning of the different POV’s I felt a connection to each of the characters and I wanted to get them out of the danger and wrap them in a blanket. Usually I’m not a big fan of different POV’s but the way the story fit together and the way back stories of the characters linked really made the plot of the book thicken.I think this book was told over the shortest time period that I’ve read and it definitely had an impact on my emotions. I think knowing that there was only a certain amount of time for everything to happen really made my heart race and my adrenaline was through the roof. This book gripped me from the start and that hasn't happened this year so it definitely made my like this book a lot more.Although this book is about a terrorist and is filled with death and grief, there is still a small part of me at the end that felt hope even through everything that has happened and that is why I recommend this book.

This book was obviously very emotional and I was in tears after reading it, but I think that the storytelling itself did the bare minimum to enhance the characters and the emotions. The topic in itself is always going to be incredibly sad so I felt like the writer relied on that a little too much instead of trying to convey the gravity herself. Also, I found myself skipping past many lines because they were just cringy- especially the dance metaphors (why was Autumn describing someone being shot as a pirouette?! ) Whilst the topic is so so important to talk about- the book to me is just disappointing.