Amina and her group all have fears, and I feel that they are relatable to many teens. However, someone seems to be targeting their small group with very personalized attacks, and Amina has a new set of fears to deal with. The book is contemporary Young Adult fiction that deals with a lot of issues in a unique way. None of the issues become too heavy and none of the characters are designed around their fear, social standing, sexuality or mental health which I appreciate because sometimes characters can feel forced or created just to deal with a social issue in some teen books. They are all just regular teens dealing with everyday issues. Each character was well-developed and unique. While their backstories and challenges weren't all divulged at once, this added another layer of mystery to the story. It was difficult for me to forget that this story took place at a high school and involved kids that were 16 to 17 years old as some of the situations felt more at a college level and classwork seemed to take a back seat. Overall, an entertaining young adult story with amazing characters.

When a motley crew of teenagers at a private boarding school bond over their fears, they form a secret survival club centered around confronting the issues that haunt them. Over the course of a school year, each member of the club plans a "game" based upon their greatest fear, which challenges the group to put their mettle to the test. Who has what it takes to survive?

Michelle Falkoff's YA novel How to Pack for the End of the World is NOT about the end of the world, but rather is a story about connection and "being seen" among a group of unlikely friends. This novel is touted to be similar to The Breakfast Club, and on a more simplistic level, the comparison holds true. This group includes the rich one, the popular one, the shy one, the strange one, and the seemingly normal one, all bonding over a shared interest of survival.

While this book is solid and interesting enough, it was not the book I expected to read. The cover, title, and summary make it appear as if it follows a group of doomsday preppers as they make plans to survive the end of the world. While a few "prepper" elements are included in a couple of the games, that is the only nod to the theme that this novel purports. Because the story of this book went completely off brand, I couldn't help but feel disappointed by the end because I solely picked up this novel expecting it to be about preparing for the apocalypse. Notwithstanding, it is still a decent read, just not the one I wanted.

I think this book suffered from being published at the wrong time. Every day feels like it could be the end of the world right now in reality, so I couldn't get through more than a few chapters before I had to set it down. Maybe when/if things get "back to normal" this will feel like fiction again.

I don't know about this one. For one thing, it's boarding school, a situation so far outside the normal teen experience. And in this case I don't know that that setting is entirely necessary. The plot could easily have taken place in a regular community. It's also prepper adjacent. The tie between trauma in your past and prepper tendencies is a bit overblown and oversimplifies both mental illness and the prepper lifestyle. It was compelling enough to finish reading once I got started but I don't know that I'd recommend it to others.

Okay. I had a totally planned out review that centered around the word “nice”. Because this book was nice. A solid storyline, wild side plot that turned out to be the plot twist, and characters generic enough that anyone could see something of themselves in at least one of them. See? Nice. But then I read the final paragraph and holy crap. Chef’s kiss. Heart eyes emoji. I can’t explain why. It just literally gave me an entirely new perspective on the book overall. I was ready to drop a solid 3 star review, but that new question needed it’s own star!

I received this book as an ARC from NetGalley.

Amina is a new 10th grader at the prestigious, private Gardner Academy. She is a scholarship student, rather than one of the rich kids who generally inhabit the campus. She feels isolated. She is haunted since her synagogue burned down and suffers from nightmares. As orientation begins, she joins four other student to form a club. The purpose of the club is two-fold: to provide them with something interesting for their college applications and to help them prepare for the catastrophes they are all sure they will ultimately have to face.

They decide to create survival games. Each one, in turn, sets the rules for the challenge. As the weeks progress and they become better at "packing for the end of the world," they learn about each other and themselves.

This book was excellent, not only for young adults, but for mature readers, as well. The characters are well drawn and the scenarios they create are realistic.

How to Pack for the End of the World is an interesting tale of teens at a private school. They come together to form a group of “preppers” planning for the end of the world as we know it. They use elaborate games to help them along the way. When someone begins to play devious pranks on each person, the typical high school drama and angst makes its presence known.

When you mix the jock, the nerd, a social influencer, and a girl traumatized by a fire at her former Jewish school, the story is bound to be diverse and entertaining.

I enjoyed the mystery of this tale. It does rely on the trope of misunderstandings between the characters, but that is true to form for this age group.

The pacing felt off in a few spots, but I know reading books like this during a pandemic certainly plays into my concentration.

Overall, I believe young adults will relate to the characters and situations and should find this story to their liking.

I read this as a possibility for dystopian fiction for my high school students. LOVE it! It is definitely a book they can relate to, not just the characters but also the subject matter discussed. In this age when so many young people are finding causes to support and finding their own voices, Falkoff has written a story that will engage many students in deep thinking conversations.

I tried multiple times over the past few months to get this book and I'm so glad I did. But the description doesn't say much about the actual plot, so I guess I'll describe it here.
It's not actually a survival or apocalyptic story, but more of a contemporary with some mystery elements. Which is my favorite type of book. And it's set at a boarding school. Not the usual stuffy, strict kind, but more like the kind from the show "Zoey 101." Amina Hareli is starting her sophomore year there because of the constant anxiety and nightmares she suffers from at home, as well as her obsession with reading about potential impending disasters, that caused her parents to send her away. At the beginning of the year, she is invited to the school's "game night" (which my middle school/high school actually did) where she is introduced to a group that seems to share her obsessions, but all for different reasons: environmental activist Hunter, who tries as hard as possible to distance himself from his dad's oil corporation, fashion-blogger Chloe, who grew up poor in rural Pennsylvania and has a fear of nuclear accidents, tough-girl Jo, an orphan who was once homeless and appears very secretive to most of the school, and athletic Wyatt, a former commune member who was raised by doomsday preppers. They are inspired to start a club after one of them asks the question, "If the world were ending, would you rather die with your family and friends or have to survive on your own and build a completely new life?"
They name themselves the Eucalyptus Society and meet in the school's old bomb shelter, where they take turns challenging themselves to increasingly difficult survival-based games and simulations. Hunter takes the group out into the woods to gather plants and determines who would have the most edible ones, Amina hypothesizes a dramatically split country where money is very scarce, Chloe gets everyone to find an abandoned room and decorate it for a secret end-of-the-world party, and Jo's approach is possibly the most intense of them all: a challenge to see who can go the longest without using electricity.
Meanwhile, someone is targeting the group anonymously by publicly humiliating them one-by-one. It's not likely that someone from the group is involved, but does Amina really know her new friends as well as she thinks she does?
Trigger warning: Anti-Semitic hate crime mentioned towards the beginning, not in too much detail
I related a lot to Amina and her constant "doom-scrolling" as I've struggled with anxiety for the majority of my life and tend to fixate on what could possibly go wrong. There was a part of every Eucalyptus Society member that I loved (such as Jo's nicknaming everyone!) and wanted to keep reading about.
I definitely was hoping that none of them were behind the pranks. That reveal, speaking of, was satisfying.as well. I just wish that there was more closure with how the Eucalyptus Society dealt with the perpetrator.

I really enjoyed this book and would recommend you give this one a read!

Amina is a high school girl forced to attend the prestigious private school, Gardner Academy. Despite all her negative thoughts and feelings at the beginning, she soon finds herself a group of friends by joining a survivalist club. In the club, they spend their time creating and competing in various types of survival scenario games. Soon though, Amina realizes someone is playing their own twisted and cruel game with all the members of the club and she is determined to find out who it is before they cause any more damage.

This book has a little bit of everything I love to see in a YA novel - drama, romance, humor, and more. We see characters grow and change individually and in their relationships together, all while they realize that maybe being obsessed over trying to survive the end of the world is not as important as trying to stop it from happening.

How to Pack for the End of the World
by Michelle Falkoff
Pub Date: 10 Nov 2020
read courtesy of http://netgalley.com

Put five different competitive high schoolers together to see who can survive hypothetical apocalyptic disasters, and you get five unique interesting challenges. Falkoff crafted an entertaining story that expertly incorporated five different characterizations into the survival scenarios. I found some fairly profound truths in this story that resonated with me: (1) "I hated that I tended to assume people were straight unless they indicated otherwise." (2) "Funny how different it felt, having a crush versus liking someone who liked you back. I'd had butterflies with Hunter, but they'd made me feel a little bit sick. Wyatt made me feel nothing but happy." (3) "We'd been so fixated on managing big-picture problems that we hadn't yet learned how to deal with the day-to-day complexities of being ourselves..."

Unfortunately, the author used some standard YA story formulas that I tend to dislike. For example the characters don't tell others how they feel but then expect others to be mind readers and act a certain way. In addition, this author actually comes out and has a character articulate another overused plot line "...where we need to help ourselves because the adults weren't going to be of much use."

Throughout the book, the lead character Amina frequently claims she doesn't know her friends as well as they know her. The purpose of this characterization is so she can eventually prove she does end up knowing one her friends better than her other friends do. The repetitive self-deprecation, however, is annoyingly tedious.

Nonetheless, I like the ending in which the characters learn to be " ...less concerned with what we put in our go-bags and more about how to use cooperation and empathy to prevent the things we were so scared of from happening." I only wish that Falkoff had listened to her own advice. Why was it necessary for her to call out 'Republican' vs. 'Democrat' in a doomsday scenario in which a Republican was so "unpopular" that he got elected for a third and fourth term?

Since the good messages outweigh the trite precepts, I will enjoy putting this book into the hands of my high schoolers.