Book Review: This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp

Title: This is Where it Ends
Author: Marieke Nijkamp
Published: 2016 by Sourcebooks, Inc
Pages: 282
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
IBSN: 9781492622468
My Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

 

 

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. (Goodreads)

My thoughts:

I was very excited about this book when I first bought it. I heard it was written by a dutch author and so as a fellow Dutchie I really hoped it would be a great book. But I was kind of let down.

The book deals with a very important issue in the United States, that being school shootings. Therefore, I was expecting a very heavy and accurate portrayal of these events and what effect that would have on the survivors. But instead, I got a cheesy kind of romance with a very fluffy description of a school shooting.

I found the book to be extremely superficial, this important and heavy issue wasn’t at all explored in depth and that for me was the biggest let down of the book. The description of the deaths that these characters witnessed was very very little and at most it described what the victims looked like, and not at all what kind of effect this had on the characters themselves.

Another thing that annoyed me about this book was that it was written in multiple points of view. That is something that if you use it, it needs to be well executed. Which, in this case, it wasn’t. I felt as though every character had the same voice so to speak.

Lastly, I was very disappointed in Nijkamp’s portrayal of the shooter. He was put away as the bad guy very quickly and there was no in-depth look into how he came to this decision. The shooter was extremely one dimensional. All the victims and survivors had extremely sad stories that connected them to the shooter and the shooter was simply the shooter. After finishing this book I had more questions than answers. I wondered how the shooter came to his decision, why he decided that this was the nessesary outcome of passed events, and what was the final straw that made him snap?

This book could have been great, amazing and influential. But in the end it was a fluffy sad story, with a black and white portrayal of shool shootings and an easy ending. It had no depth into important issues and was a let down. Considering this I gave the book 2 out of 5 stars, mostly because I really liked the book cover.