Trigger warnings: Gun violence, school shootings, graphic depictions of violence, suicide
Synopsis: 10:00 a.m. The principal of Opportunity 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 a.m. The auditorium doors won't open.
10:05 a.m. Someone starts shooting.
Told from four different perspectives over the span of fifty-four harrowing minutes, terror reigns as one student’s calculated revenge turns into the ultimate game of survival.
Review: Marieke's books are incredibly fast to read. This is Where it Ends is a multi-perspective story about a school shooting. Just to clarify my personal experience with these situations, I have been a part of 2 major school threats. Once in middle school where there was a bomb threat and we were all sent home. The other in college when there was a murder-suicide. It was a very short issue, but I was at work at the library on campus, and the terror of not knowing what is happening was real. The perspectives we follow are people who all knew the killer personally. Some people will likely have problems with this because they do have moments of denial and humanization for the shooter. Personally, that didn't bother me because shooters do tend to have relationships of some kind. It would be ignorant to act like no one had any personal connection to the killer. Especially since this was set in a small town. I feel like I can't really talk about characters I liked because, unlike traditional stories where characters face challenges and develop, This is Where it Ends makes their sole purpose to survive this hour of terror.
There are some elements that took me out of the story. In large part, I kept picturing this scenario happening in my high school gym because that's where we had our start of term assembly. Obviously, all high schools are different, but I knew that this scenario would have played out in a completely different way at my school. That was a very distracting, intrusive thought while I was reading this book. I did like the little snippets from blogs or social media. I thought those were incredibly accurate to how people would react. Whether they are part of the incident, or outsiders looking for information. I also liked how many of the characters kept asking, "Could I have stopped this." I felt like that was especially important given how we were reading from people who all knew the shooter. There was a weird scene where the shooter wanted his sister to dance. I had a hard time imagining that as a real desire.
Engaging story that had a few distracting elements.
3 howls
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