Thursday 17 September 2015

REVIEW: WE ALL LOOKED UP by Tommy Wallach

Summary:
Before the asteroid we let ourselves be defined by labels:
The athlete, the outcast, the slacker, the overachiever. 

But then we all looked up and everything changed. 

They said it would be here in two months. That gave us two months to leave our labels behind. Two months to become something bigger than what we'd been, something that would last even after the end. 

Two months to really live.



Title: We All Looked Up
Author: Tommy Wallach
Source: Owned (Purhcased from Kobo)
Publisher
: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Publication Date: March 24, 2015
Rating: 3/5 stars
Purchase:
"Question: How could you look the end of the world in the face and not go crazy? Answer: You couldn't."

I thought this one had a good concept, but a "meh" execution. I thought it almost tried to hard to be the new version of The Breakfast Club and it just fell short. I think the problem was that they didn't really "break" any of the stereotypes because they weren't even written as a stereotype. 

My biggest problem with this was that there was two months for them to do things and it was still oddly paced. There was a week in a detention centre that seemed to come out of nowhere, and then the party is on -- no it's off -- no it's on again. It just seemed silly and trivial. And I think that is what the majority of my issues were: everything seemed trivial.

The end of the world is coming and all anyone can focus on is who is in love with whom and getting laid. I would have loved way more focus on the familial relationships than the newly formed relationships that the characters created. And the relationships between the characters felt forced and unnatural. Everyone, but Peter, was an asshole. Like they were not nice to one another, really. And they were using each other to get human contact before the end of the world, which was like k. The instalove between EVERYONE was too much for me as well. I didn't like it, didn't find it romantic, I just saw it as everyone being desperate and needing human contact without caring too much about who was giving it to them.

I did like the ending though. I liked the openness to it and allowing the reader to make their own conclusions based on what was said throughout. But I thought that some of the other ending decisions were kind of out of line with the rest of the story.

"People talked about their days being numbered, but really, everything was numbered."

It's a good read. It is easy and makes you question things. I feel like if I hadn't already started my quarter-life crisis, this book could have kick started it. But it was still kind of meh to me.

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