Review: This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp

Set across fifty-four minutes This is Where it Ends tells the story of a school shooting, and it's impact on four students, all of whom are connected in some way with the lone gunman. Clare, Thomas, Sylvia and Autumn all have a reason to fear Tyson. Clare is his ex-girlfriend, Thomas wants to protect his twin sister Sylv from Tyson (there is a history of sexual assault,) and Autumn is the girlfriend of Sylv and the younger sister of Tyson.

And today, Tyson has walked inside Opportunity High with a gun. He wants to punish the kids who ostracised him, and he wants to punish our four main characters by forcing them to watch.

This story is made all the more horrific by the reality of just how common school shootings have become. It gives a very human side to the story--different to the headlines that we might see or hear about. The most tragic part of the story of all is that Tyson does it because he wants notoriety. He wants those who were close to him to suffer, and he wants to be remembered. 

The characters themselves are pleasingly diverse. This book isn't the domain of straight, middle class white kids who desire traditional careers. Clare, for example, is resentful that her older sister is regarded as braver than her because she has joined the military; while one of the heros of the day is Fareed, a refugee who keeps a cool head in all of the chaos, allowing him to come up with solutions that keep some of the other kids safe. Autumn and Sylv are dating one another and come from different cultural backgrounds. Given that the book is set over the course of fifty-four minutes and the subject matter, the author didn't have an easy job of establishing the characters or their personalities, so it would be easy to complain that the characters aren't really as fleshed out as they could be. However, it's also fair to say that we really only get a very tiny glimpse into their lives and into a gruelling fifty-four minutes during which they were focusing on survival. There are surprising examples of bravery and innovation, demonstrating just how clever teens have the potential to be.

Enjoyable, though morbid. Recommended. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more