ARC Review: At the End of Everything by Marieke Nijkamp

At the End of Everything by Marieke Nijkamp
Published by Sourcebooks Fire on January 25, 2022
Genres: YA Science Fiction
Pages: 400
Source: the publisher
Format: ARC
My Rating:
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Blurb:

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.

My Review:

I really liked this book. It took what we are dealing with right now, but also just was a plague type of book. We used to read these all the time and people loved them, but now because of the whole COVID thing, people complain about it. I get some people don’t want to read about the pandemic or things similar to that while we are still basically dealing with one. But the negative reviews with that as the only reason aren’t fair to me. If I don’t enjoy a book for a personal reason like that, I don’t rate it based on that. But I digress from my review.

There were several characters to get to know. And in a way, I wish I’d known more about some of the more major characters. But I feel we got some background on a a few of them that made their stories kind of stand out. And it made the way they acted and reacted to situations make sense.

I don’t think we’re given an exact timeline for how long this is going on. But I did have a few questions. Like for the people that were basically in comas at the juvenile center, how did they not die from not getting food? Or how did the students there feed them? That was one big thing that I kept wondering about. It was great for the few that were able to wake up even after being sick and others dying.

I liked the way the town was going and the rations and all that. I liked the way it kind of had some mentions about how everyone was exposed but not everyone got it and died. And then it definitely wasn’t all happy ending, everyone is going to survive either. There were some really sad moments as well.

The characters represent many different ways. One, Emerson, who used they/them pronouns. We had girls who were gay, and I don’t think we had any boys that we met that were gay though. We had a girl who didn’t talk. We don’t know why exactly, but she used a sign language that she and her twin made up and so it wasn’t easy for her to communicate. And of course we also had some bullies, both kids as well as the guards and people in charge at the center, and even some of the scary people when they had to go into town to try to find food.

This author’s books have been kind of up and down for me, but this one definitely had me interested the whole time and I would call it a win for me.