The World Ends in April

July 1, 2019
It's so annoying that Elle's survivalist grandfather makes her do all these prepper drills--until she learns about the asteroid headed for Earth. Elle's widowed father loves his dad but can't stand the way Grandpa Joe pulls Elle and her kid brothers into all his survivalist planning. Elle barely tolerates the surprise drills, the inspections of her bug-out bag, the insistence that she eat disgusting MREs. But one day, she comes upon a scary website in which a Harvard astrophysicist explains that an asteroid is going to hit the planet in the spring. Maybe all of Grandpa Joe's training will come in handy after all! She enlists the help of her best (and only) friend, but Mack is the opposite of loner Elle, and he brings other students into their survival planning. With Mack, Elle finds herself leading the Hamilton Middle School Nature Club, teaching a few of her fellow students about water filters and heirloom seeds. But while Elle wants Mack laser-focused on the apocalypse and on her, he's distracted by the swim team--and worse, by his possible transfer to the Conrad School for the Blind. Mack is both kind and adventurous, but it's unfortunate the didactic descriptions of his assistive tools lack accuracy in this context. Elle and her family are white, Mack's black, and their classmates are racially diverse. Watching these kids spiral into paranoia, fueled by a fraudulent internet tale of conspiracies, makes for compelling reading. A page-turner. (author's note, bibliography) (Fiction. 11-13)

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August 1, 2019

Gr 3-7-Eleanor's grandfather is a "prepper," a person who takes preparing for disasters to a new level. She doesn't enjoy participating in her grandfather's emergency drills as much as she once did-that is, until she comes across a website run by a former Harvard professor that forecasts a devastating asteroid collision that will cause The End of the World As We Know It (TEOTWAWKI) in just a few months. Her grandfather's influence makes it easy for Elle to become obsessed with preparing for the impact despite her father's objections. Her mother died several years ago, so she can't talk to her about it. It's hard to tell if her best friend Mack believes her, but he goes along with her plans. Elle starts a club at school and writes a newsletter to teach fellow students survival skills. They drink toilet water through a filtration straw, pack Bug-Out Bags, and learn about edible plants, but when even Mack and new friend Londyn don't take her warnings seriously enough, Elle ratchets up her efforts and lands in big trouble. The author does a good job of matching the pace of the writing to Elle's state of mind; the more frantic and anxious Elle gets, the more quickly the action moves. It eventually becomes clear that each member of Elle's covertly named "Nature Club" has a reason for wanting the world to end. Readers will be eager to see if TEOTWAWKI comes true (spoiler: it doesn't) and how Eleanor handles returning to school after her alarming predictions fail to come true. VERDICT A fast-paced story that deals with grief, loss, and mental health through the lens of middle school catastrophe. Recommended.-Julie Overpeck, Holbrook Middle School, Lowell, NC

Copyright 2019 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 28, 2019
Elle’s grandfather is a “prepper” who stages drills and stockpiles food and supplies to survive unspecified, inevitable cataclysmic events. The seventh grader becomes a convert to his cause after embracing online posts by a sacked Harvard astronomer who predicts that an asteroid will soon destroy Earth. Elle convinces her kind and witty best friend, Mack, who is blind, to help her launch a clandestine survival club at school, and she also teams up with her snippety former nemesis, Londyn, to publish the Doomsday Express newsletter to prepare their peers for the imminent Armageddon. Though the overwrought, single-thread plot begins to strain credibility and patience, McAnulty (The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl) adds substantial layers to the story with insights into her emotionally vulnerable protagonists’ credence in the pending apocalypse: Elle reasons it will save her from braving school without Mack, who is transferring to a school for the blind; Londyn hopes it will reunite her separated parents. Throughout, snippets of sly humor lighten the novel’s potential darkness, as when Elle muses, “I think asteroids have a way of wiping out middle school drama. It’s one of the plus sides of the end of the world.” Ages 8–12.