This Is Where It Ends: International Edition

I couldn't read more than a few chapters at a time. This book was hard hitting and gut wrenching and soul crushing. It takes you through a school shooting through the POVs of 4 different students and it's like you're there with them - afraid for you own life and for the ones you love and the ones you don't even know. You see the massacre and the students die, shot for no reason other than the extreme psychological collapse of a very disturbed teen who wants to extract revenge against all those who he sees as his enemies. Through the book, I found myself obviously rooting for the 4 main protagonists but I also found myself praying that all the other kids and teachers made it to safety. I felt my heart break a little every time a small side character with no name was shot. I found myself counting the number of times he shot his gun and wondering just how many bullets he had left over and how many magazines he had carried with him.This book is too close to reality and it makes you really think about the gun violence and shootings that have become the norm in America. It makes you angry. Angry with the parents who hit their children, angry with students who bully others, angry that troubled kids don't get the help they need, and angry with the laws that allow anybody to buy a gun from a shop as easily as they could buy gum. At some point, you can't continue reading anymore. It's a sad world we live in when books like this hit home and hit hard and you know that these things happen more times than we even know.

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.

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 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.

~ARC provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review~Initially, I'm very iffy when it comes to books with multiple POVs. But for this story’s case, it suited. TIWIE is a novel that gripped me at every page, portraying an all too realistic scenario, one that no one can ever imagine occurring happening in their lifetime, but has already occurred 15 in the US alone this year (source: Wikipedia).In 54 minutes, every student and teacher present in the auditorium of Opportunity High School, Alabama, is fighting for their lives against one boy, one of their own. What was frightening about this story is that it can happen everywhere. But there's a difference between hearing about that and being thrown into such situation.This book follows a few different characters during the hour that the shooting takes place. Each character is so completely different and so important in their own ways. I think the central aspect which I really enjoyed was the diversity of the characters. There’s a scene where Tomas is worried for Fareed and how, his faith and heritage, may portray him as a threat to the police officers was a touching moment for me because of how real it was. I really hope more authors begin to write about marginalised character because, honestly, I'm all for seeing more Muslim characters in novels.However, I do believe the psychology behind the perpetrator’s act was a bit foolish. It boils to the simple “He was evil,” and that’s it. We never really find out why Tyler did it— he goes from being a supportive brother to someone who beats and abuses his sister. It’s too simplistic, and I think that was a fatal flaw in this novel, along with missing out a chance of looking at the psychology of teen shooters and focusing more on the cheap thrills. Overall, it was an exciting read. Though some scenes felt strange, I don't want to judge because who on earth would know what they'd do in this situation when they don't know what else is going to happen?

As more school shootings happen, so, too, do books about them seem to proliferate as people try to make sense of something that seems nonsensical. There’s the infamous We Need To Talk About Kevin, the darkly funny Vernon God Little and plenty more – including this young adult offering, This is Where It Ends. At 10am, the principal of Opportunity High School finishes her welcome speech, marking the start of a new semester. At 10.03am, the auditorium doors won’t open. At 10.05am the shooting begins. Told from the perspective of four different students with personal connections to the shooter, this book tracks the incident minute-by-minute in heart-stopping detail. At moments, it is truly terrifying. The shooting, as I imagine it is in reality, is brutal, indiscriminate and all the more scary for it, and the scenes inside the auditorium were incredibly powerful.However, for me, it just wasn’t nuanced enough; school shootings are such a complex issue and tackled so well elsewhere, that this felt a bit bland at times. The four voices we hear all felt quite similar; although the characters ostensibly had quite a few differences between them, they spoke in the same way and were all quite clearly the ‘good guys’ when put against the shooter. There were moments were the narrative tried to give him redeeming qualities, but they were weighed down by how ‘evil’ he was portrayed in other moments. I’m not sure it’s always as clear cut as that, and I wish that he’d had a chance to speak in the same way as his ‘victims’. There was so much potential, but I feel like the other books I mentioned do a better job of tackling such a deep and difficult topic.