Review: This Is Where It Ends

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About This Is Where It Ends

Release Date: January 5, 2016

10:00 a.m.
The principal of Opportunity, Alabama’s high school finishes her speech, welcoming the entire student body to a new semester and encouraging them to excel and achieve.

10:02 a.m.
The students get up to leave the auditorium for their next class.

10:03 a.m.
The auditorium doors won’t open.

10:05 a.m.
Someone starts shooting.

Told over the span of 54 harrowing minutes from four different perspectives, terror reigns as one student’s calculated revenge turns into the ultimate game of survival.


This book is coming out at a time where school shootings have, unfortunately, become common occurrences in our lives. It’s hard to even imagine what being in one would be like, let alone losing loved ones. Suffice to say, this was a huge story for the author to try to tackle.

This Is Where It Ends tells the story of a school shooting through four different perspectives, all of who have some kind of relationship with the shooter. From these different perspectives, readers gain flashbacks that try to explain how the shooter got to this point. While they show that he was alone, abused, and grieving, there is still no answer as to why he decided to shoot up his old school.

The cast is diverse, which is great. However, sometimes the author’s writing made the characters merge into one voice. The writing was very lyrical, which annoyed me at times. It seemed as if the characters kept spouting out metaphors every which way and that made them seem older than high school students. Even made it a little unbelievable.

It’s not that I didn’t not like the book, it’s just that I didn’t like it either. The book was neutral to me. I didn’t really feel anything more for the characters that were dying than that this should never happen, which is terrible. I wasn’t connected enough to the individuals to feel sadden by their deaths, even though the author tried to make that possible with a one-to-two sentence explanation of that character’s life before they died. There were two characters’ deaths that I was sadden by, and they were main characters.

Overall, I just don’t know what to say. People will love this book, and people will hate. I don’t know if I can recommend this one.

My Rating:

*This ARC was provided to me by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.*

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