From the “author to watch” (Kirkus Reviews) of The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley comes an “equal parts sarcastic and profound” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving. Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry … will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.
Only he isn’t sure he wants to.
After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year.
Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.
But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world–and his pain–be destroyed forever.more
Read this book if you want to understand the Gen Z teenager. While it’s not necessarily chockfull of Gen Z technology, and feels in some ways more Gen X, it captures the complete despair that many Gen Zs face on a daily basis. The question of why bother and the ultimate existential answer is predictable but always true. Incredibly dark, very depressing, and yet illuminating.
I absolutely LOVED this book! It’s my favorite so far this year.
I cried a lot. I developed feelings for every single character, even the ones that weren’t even in the actual story (Jesse and Evie, ugh). I loved the tone of the book, that it isn’t necessarily a message of hope, but it’s also not one of doom. I loved that there were so many things happening at once with everyone, good things and bad things, because that’s just how life goes.
I loved Henry. I felt everything he was going though and found myself asking ‘why are people like this?’ one too many times. I loved his personality, his sense of humor, his heart. I loved that we don’t get to know if the aliens were real and if the world ends. It doesn’t matter.
I loved the several different ends he imagines for the world. The bees were my favorite, because it’s SO CLOSE to happening. Scary.
I loved that the book is a huge ‘putting things into perspective’ thing, but even when we know it doesn’t matter, that everything is going to end and everyone is going to die, we can’t put things into perspective. We can’t let it go. We hurt, we seek answers, we want to believe.
Yes, in the end, it doesn’t matter. But it does. It matters a lot.
I fell in love with this book after I read the first page. It’s absolutely amazing.
I suck at reviews so dont judge me. Im sad because I will never find a book as good and original as this. It left me in a reading slump for weeks. I’m a slow reader and i will finish books in like 4 months, but i finished in 2 weeks. I highly recommend this.
I loved this book so much!!
This book was amazing!
“We can choose to sit on our asses and wait for the end or we can live right now. We can march to the edge of the void and scream in defiance. Yell out for all to hear that we do matter. That we are still here, living our absurd, bullshit lives, and nothing can take that away from us. Not rogue comets, not black holes, not the heat death of the universe. We may not get to choose how we die, but we can choose how we live.”
So here we are, January 6th and I honestly don’t believe I will read a better book this year. I had never heard of this book before but I was scrolling through Scribd seeing if anything new was added and this popped up. I’ll be honest, the cover caught my eye. I wasn’t sure was I was expecting when I started this book, but this book completely destroyed me.
If you knew the world was ending and could prevent it, would you? This is a story about a high school kid named Henry who is repeatedly abducted by aliens. They communicate with him that Earth will be destroyed unless he hits this big red button. You could say his life hasn’t been easy. His boyfriend hung himself, his father left when he was a kid, his grandma is slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s and he is constantly tormented in school. Would be a pretty easy decision for him to just let the world burn.
This sounds kinda cheesy with the aliens and what not. But this book became more than alien abduction and whether or not the world deserves to continue. This book was about how you can’t live in the past. Your history makes up who you are but not who you become. I was enthralled by this book from the beginning. It hard quirky, dark humor. Loss. Love. Heartbreak. Horror. It had everything I could want in a book wrapped in a beautifully written package.
I’m so glad I stumbled across this book and I will be hard-pressed in finding a book that tops it any time soon. I honestly am having trouble completely putting my thoughts into words on this book. It truly was a wonderful read. Don’t let the alien thing deter you from giving this a try. While the potential end of the world is a big theme throughout the entire book, the alien part isn’t so much.
Just trust me. Go read this. You won’t regret it.
Very good book. Brought up some serious topics, but made them flow into the reading very nicely.