I can tell from the content warning this book is not for me. Thank you for the opportunity to read and review.

A good YA book about a tough subject but indeed worth the read. Just not for everyone. I would recommend for older teens.

Thank you to Netgalley and Sourcebooks Fire for providing me with a free digital copy in exchange for an honest review.

2.5 stars rounded up to 3 stars

At the End of Everything is, in a way, a sort of modern-day reimagining of Lord of the Flies set against a pandemic backdrop.

While I appreciated aspects of the story—a unique consideration of an overlooked population affected by a pandemic, each character's struggles, the quiet desperation tinged with hope—I wanted a bit more... with just about, well, everything.

Of course, there was the overarching plot line, and a few subplots thrown in for good measure, but I found myself hungry for more tension and drama to keep me turning the pages. I kept hoping for something to happen, so I'd keep on reading, and then wonderfully a subplot would appear, only to be resolved a short time later (and without any complications that would affect the main storyline).

This novel was told from multiple POVs of the teens in the treatment center. But there were simply too many voices with too little character development to get me invested in their outcomes. And because the character development was lacking, I often found myself forgetting whose POV I was in since none of them were fully developed individuals.

There's also the timing of this novel set within our current-day pandemic to contend with. Many readers simply aren't ready for a read that's so close to reality.

Multiple times I considered DNFing the book, but by the time I was ready to give up I was so far in and too invested in my progress to walk away.

I also recognize that as a YA novel, I am not this book's target audience. I do believe some teens and young adults will appreciate and find value in this novel's themes and messages.

A different take on a pandemic, At the End of Everything gives the reader a look into a place that no one ever thinks about; a place the certainly everyone forgot about when the world went crazy. Hope Juvenile Treatment Center is located in the mountains of Arkansas, and the residents are delinquents in every shape and form. The reader is introduced to several "main" characters, and it is through their voices the story is told.

The guards and warden just up and leave one day, and no one knows why. When a select few wander outside, free from their prison, they find that they are relegated back to that same prison. A plague has been unleashed on the world, and one of them has been infected. They are then split into two groups: one to try their luck out in the real world and one that stays behind to ration food and tend to their sick.

Every voice has a shattered past, but they all look toward the future and do not want to be forgotten. While not every bit was enjoyable, the writing style was different and kept my interest. There are interspersed phone conversations and news stories that allow you to find out what is going on with the sickness in the world. You see how characters change or don't change; some for the better and definitely some not. But it is a tale of survival, and it comes at a time where the real world is in somewhat chaos, just not as bad as this tale.

Thank you, SOURCEBOOK Fire and NetGalley, for the ARC. The opinions expressed are my own.

This reminded me a great deal of This is where it ends, but in the context of the pandemics instead of a school shooting. It was good, it was more thrilling than I had expected, but it is too early for that topic to come up in our leisure time.

The juvenile treatment center has been abandoned by all people who could be responsible for the teenagers inside and they have no idea why. Until they break out, only to find there is a plague—the Plague—widespread and killing. Without receiving food or any attention from the state, they have to organize and treat themselves on their own despite their differences.

3.5 rounded up to 4.

As always, this author's control of plot and character development is superb. The story is told from three points of view, and I feel this was my favorite work since This is where it ends. It had me crying, it had me cheering, it had me questioning and wondering.

It is still a book about a widespread and contagious disease. It is not Covid but it is very similar, except it makes the word into a war field, very similar to the distopic YA's that were popular some years ago. It's all written on the summary, so I feel that anyone that gets this book will be ready to read scenarios that have distopically become part of our present. I also feel it was an interesting take to focus on kids in a juvenile center. I really hope there isn't a true story behind this, but I can't say it didn't sound real, unfortunately.

If you're aware of what you're getting into, I think it can be therapeutical to some. And it's not only that, there is a proper story that I found not only scary but all compelling. As usual for Nijkamp's books, you'll find diversity in the characters too. It's not a comfortable reading, but it was well built.

For most of the YA I read, I like to go into it blind. Sourcebooks sent me an ARC of this one, and when it came up as my next on my TBR, I was excited. I've loved this author's other books, and knew this one would definitely be fantastic. As I began reading, and as I got to know the teens living at Hope Juvenile Treatment Center, I fell in love with them. And after the guards abandoned them in the wake of a deadly virus, the actual Plague, these teens had to band together if they had any hope of survival. Of course, the teens did wander out to discover why the guards had left them all alone, and soon after, the first victim begins coughing, and death soon follows.

As the plague spreads, the teens begin to realize that the government has left them to fend for themselves. Ration cards do not make their way to the treatment center. They have no medication to take care of each other. After a time, their phones and internet fail and they have no way to get information from the outside world.

We follow three teen perspectives: Logan, Grace, and Emerson as they attempt to do what they can to make it through this trying time. I loved them all. My heart soared with them, and broke for them. And I was sobbing by the end. I loved this book.

These teens are resourceful. They are magnificent. They embody the spirit that I see every day in the teens that walk into our library. And they challenge the stereotypes of teens who go to detention centers. The author's note was really informative too, so definitely read that after you finish this book. I gobbled it right up and cannot wait for it to hit shelves so I can add it to mine.

Appropriate for grades 8+.

A mysterious plague has crippled the world and the guards of Hope Juvenile center have abandoned their charges and left the kids on their own. We alternately follow the story of the kids through the eyes of three of kids- Logan, Grace, and Emerson. They must figure out how to navigate and run the center in their own and determine what each will do to help or hurt those who remained at the center.

This is a story of survival and hard times. It is definitely heavily COVID influenced and it feels a bit soon for me personally to read it. I think the ending left me wishing for a bit brighter outlook and left me a bit disappointed. I think it was the authors intent to paint a bleak story of those she feels are forgotten and abandoned

I received a digital copy from NetGalley and Sourcebooks so that I could share my thoughts

I really wanted to like this book, and I thank the publisher for sending it to me. I thought the writing was good and the idea of it was excellent. For some reason, I just couldn’t get into it and only got about half way through before I stopped reading it altogether.

I would read a chapter or two at a time, and when I picked it back up, I couldn’t remember a thing about what I read last. I have read the same chapter three times now - enough for me to give up. It just didn’t grab me.

Thanks to #NetGalley and Sourcebooks Fire for allowing me to read an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

They have been sent to Hope Juvenile Treatment Center to pay for their crimes and be rehabilitated into contributing members of society. The warden, the guards and their therapist are there to help them along this journey. Until all the adults leave, abandoning the teens to fend for themselves as a plague hits the US. 8 leave the facility to brave the wilderness, 22 stay. Now they have to figure our how to work together to survive even as the plague reaches the facility and the food supply dwindles.
This is a story of survival, death, hope and despair told through the voices of 3 of the teens:
Leah -who communicates through made up signs only her twin knows
Grace -who has become the reluctant leader of their group
and Emerson -who is nonbinary and trusts no one

I will definitely be adding this novel by Marieke Nijkamp to our high school library collection. I believe it would be fine for students from 8th grade up to read.

There is some language. The author includes the following content warnings: abuse, death, illness, implied eugenics, imprisonment, transphobia, mentions of assault, blood, gunshots, racial profiling, and (sexual) violence.
The sexual violence is not described in graphic detail.

OMG a book about the bubonic plague but a new kind in recent times. My sister once didn't want me to go to Europe on a trip cause of the plague lol. She also didn't want me to go to Alaska cause of vampires, I love her. But the plague was horrible and centuries ago.

But our setting is a correctional facility for teenagers. Everyone was told to shelter in place and not leave their homes. So the guards and workers just left these kids with no supervision and no care. Each one of them were there for different reasons. And as my daughter's principal says there are no bad kids, only bad circumstances. If they had the right support, encouragement and environment would they have needed to be placed at this jail type place. I am horrified by mass incarceration and even at such a young age. But also, leaving them to fend for themselves during a pandemic is also pretty horrible since those guards were abusive. In a way they are better off alone but no one is even answering their calls for help.

I wanted to keep reading to find out who survived and if that party that took off in the beginning even made it since they were out in the middle of nowhere in the Ozarks. Long story short, don't leave incarcerated people to die during a pandemic, these poor kids. This event brought out their character good and bad as they tried to survive and care for those around them as they all started getting very ill.

This had  bunch of trigger warnings since the young adults didn't have their needs or preferences considered. Their pronouns, disabilities, etc. They were considerate towards eachother but their families and other adults were another matter.

Thank you sourcebooksfire and netgalley for the e-ARC for my honest and voluntary review.

What a refreshing and interesting read! The characters are an impressively diverse group of teenagers who are living the reality of our world today - a pandemic. As a teacher, I look forward to bringing this book into my classroom.

Teens sent to Hope Juvenile Treatment Center are abandoned after a pandemic overtakes the country. Left to their own devices, they devise a plan to survive when they recognize no one is coming to their aid.

The law has labeled each character flawed, and the only "Hope" left are their flaws to survive. At the End of Everything is wonderfully paced, enthralling with writing that catches the reader. It is story centering on community, friendships, trust and a fight to be NOT be forgotten.

It is also thought provoking read- this line stuck out especially considering the times we are living. "...claiming their right to freedom supersedes others right to live."

Thank you Sourcebooks, Fire for the Advance Reader Copy.

t the End of Everything is a YA Science Fiction novel by author Marieke Nijkamp, and well, it's very much a book written during the COVID Pandemic. The book features a group of teens at a juvenile detention center - a group of teens who are more misfits for not fitting in with society than actually being deserving of imprisonment - who are abandoned their when a deadly plague strikes society. If the parallels to what happened during the COVID Pandemic weren't apparent, the occasional interludes with news articles are very blatantly almost ripped from our own headlines.

And while the resulting story isn't very original (it could go one of two ways, and it does indeed largely go that way), it works very well at hitting on its biggest theme - how society cruelly abandons those who don't fit in, forcing those people to fight for themselves, sometimes successfully, other times...not so much. The book's three main protagonists - non-binary castout Emerson, mute girl Logan, and leader Grace - are really well done, as they struggle with their situation, trying to help each other and themselves out, and find a way to do more than just survive. The result is a story that is far from optimistic, with an ending that is bittersweet, but works pretty well at hitting its readers' hearts, so they learn the lessons its trying to teach.

Trigger Warning: Dead-Naming/Misgendering (only in the first few chapters), Ableism, references to abuse - physical and sexual - and transphobia. For the most part, the worst of these behaviors are in flashbacks and only implied, as they form parts of characters' backstories, and not their present problems.


---------------------------------------------------Plot Summary----------------------------------------------------
The teenage residents of Hope Juvenile Treatment Center know better to think that the center's name is accurate - no one there really wants to provide treatment or hope to the teens imprisoned there, teens who aren't criminals as much as misunderstood.

For Logan, the center is only bearable because her other half, her twin Leah is with her - as Leah is the only one who understands her, with or without sign language.

For Emerson, a non-binary teen who ran away from his religious family after they cast them out, the center is just the latest place that doesn't understand them.

For Grace, a girl who wouldn't let injustice go just because it was being perpetrated by a privileged white boy, the center is just another unjust place to survive.

But then one day the guards, staff, and warden of the Treatment Center disappear, and a trip outside results in the discovery that the teens have been abandoned in the wake oh a deadly world spanning plague, resulting in many of the teens deciding to flee the Center in search of something better.

But for Grace, Emerson and Logan and others, there is nowhere else to go, and so they decide to stay and try to survive. But do they really have a chance of doing so when no further aid or supplies are coming, and the plague begins to hit some of the teens themselves?
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In case it wasn't obvious, At the End of Everything is very much a story built upon the events of the COVID-19 Pandemic, especially in how its effects were felt by disadvantaged peoples - peoples who were imprisoned (who suffered greatly without much care from the general population) as well as those from disadvantaged groups without money and resources to give them access to care. And so here we have a group of teens, all of whom were thrown into Hope due to unjust circumstances that resulted in them "acting out", whether that be Grace assaulting a privileged boy implied to abuse/rape other girls or Logan and her sister setting on fire a building supposedly meant to be a shelter for kids that was instead abusing them. And then of course there's Emerson, a non-binary teen from a religious family that cast him out and then wouldn't take him back when he ran away, resulting in their imprisonment.

These are a group of teens who are cast out by society for their differences*, without regards to their own individual needs whatsoever. Each struggles with their own issues - Grace with finding something other than simply surviving and leading in an unjust world; Logan with being separated from her lifeline in her sister, without anyone who can understand the only language she can "speak"; Emerson with knowing they're non-binary despite the religious foundation of their life failing to allow for that possibility - and is now forced by the plague to struggle just to survive together. And none of them deserve the abandonment that occurs to them, forcing them to do desperate things to survive on their own, because no help is seemingly coming.

*As noted by the author in an afterword, individuals who aren't White who face these situations are treated even worse by society, but the author stated that she didn't make any of her protagonists non-white because she didn't feel that was her story as a white author she could tell, and instead the author includes a number of references to other books where readers can find those stories. I appreciate the afterword and references, but I do wish the author had tried to tell that in part in this story, using assistance from others to make sure she wrote the "other" in a proper way.*

Stories like this tend to go in one of two ways - they can go all Lord of the Flies and feature the teens forming a monstrous society that eats itself or they can feature the teens trying to work together to survive, and this book goes for that last one, because unlike the classic novel, real kids like these aren't cruel at heart. And Nijkamp makes this story work by making each of our three main protagonists, who the story jumps around between from chapter to chapter, as well as the other protagonists, well, real, in their own different ways. And so they act real when they first face being abandoned, sometimes acting out on their own, and facing new circumstances, like what seems like a betrayal, in the realistic but struggling way that you'd imagine.

Again, none of this original, and it's not even a little bit subtle, but it works for how real Nijkamp portrays things, leading up to the book's ending, which is very bittersweet and not at all happy for all of our characters. Because well, such an ending wouldn't be real or fitting, and Nijkamp doesn't try to force it onto this story. The result is a book well worth reading for young adults and adults who could really use its lessons, even if there isn't really much here unique or otherwise interesting on offer.

Wow this is an interesting read given the current times! Without giving too much away, At The End of Everything is a story about teenagers in a juvenile treatment center who are abandoned during a plague/pandemic. While the illness in the story isn’t actually COVID-19, the struggles that the characters face are very reminiscent of those we experienced in 2020 and may be triggering to some. However, the plague is put somewhat on the back burner to the main characters and their stories. I appreciated the diversity amongst the main characters and enjoyed following along with their stories and POVs.

Overall, I think that if you can handle a pandemic related story and enjoyed Lord of the Flies, you’ll enjoy At the End of Everything.

Thank you to Marieke Nijkamp, Sourcebooks Fire and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my review.

I'm afraid At the End of Everything is just not for me. I think reading about a pandemic while living through one is just a little bit too much for me. I'm sure many people will enjoy the book and maybe I will in a few years time when, hopefully, we are out of the current situation we find ourselves living in.

Thank you to NetGalley and SOURCEBOOKS Fire for my ARC.

I received an ARC from Sourcebooks Fire through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I'm struggling with my feelings about this book because my main opinion about it is that it isn't bad, I may have even liked it at a different point in time, but that publishing it now, especially as new variants of COVID-19 rage across the world, rubs me the wrong way. Other people will probably have no issue reading this book, but I thought I was going to be fine reading it and instead it was hitting on things that were just too raw and real for me to be able to enjoy this book.

For me, this pandemic has not ended, so having it fictionalized and having this book directly pull from the way that this pandemic has been reacted to was just rough. I had really enjoyed the previous works of this author that I have read but I majorly struggled with this one. I just kept thinking that I probably would have enjoyed this book if it were published five years down the line when everything isn't so raw and continuously ongoing.

I enjoyed the character development throughout the novel and thought that the little epistolary elements to break up the chapters were a nice touch. The relationships between the teens were constantly in flux as they reacted to the stressors which felt very real. I didn't like as much that each character seemed to have their one defining trait and that one trait made up most of their personality. If there were not as many narrators and each character seemed to have one trait, I would chalk it up to how that narrator views others, but even the POV characters feel like they each have one main distinctive trait.

Nobody’s ever wanted the delinquent teens of Hope Juvenile Treatment Center. When they wake up one day and discover they’ve been abandoned by their guards, they think they have a shot at freedom…until they realize that a pandemic has taken hold of the world outside, and they’ve actually been left to die. Now their ignored existence has become a deadly fight for survival—and the only people they can rely on are each other.

Review: I found this to be an interesting story that kept me engaged. I do however find that the overall character development was lacking, I will say, that as a parent of a child with selective mutism, it was refreshing to see representation of it in the book.

At the End of Everything by Marieke Nijkamp takes place at Hope Juvenile Treatment Center. It follows a group of teenagers who are living at the facility. When the guards and the rest of the staff at Hope begin to act strangely, one day they just don’t show up for work. The teenagers come together to bust out of the facility, but are soon met with soldiers blocking them from the closest town. It turns out there is an extremely infectious disease spreading outside of Hope. No one can leave home without a permit, so the teens are stuck at Hope with no one looking after them as supplies dwindle. The group is on their own to try to survive in a world that has left them to die.

This book is very timely and emotional. It spreads the message that everyone deserves a chance to survive regardless of their past. The multiple points of view allow the reader to learn so much about each main character.

"At the End of Everything" provides an alternate perspective of the pandemic we're currently living through. Readers follow the stories of several teens from the ironically named, Hope Treatment Center and their abandonment during a "plague". Of course, there is a very obvious diverse representation within Nijkamp's book. As with other Nijkamp books that I've owned and read, there is a perfect balance of back story, build-up, life skills, and suspense present from beginning to end. I thoroughly enjoyed the book.

This book is not my normal read but when I read the blurb it drew me in and I had to read it and I am so glad that I did ! Wow the writing is exceptionally good I was immediately drawn in and couldn’t put it down this book was amazing if you love YA apocalyptic thrillers than you’ll love this story! It’s full of action suspense and mystery the storyline was unique and intriguing and that’s what drew me in and this was a unputdownable story like no other that I’ve read! Amazing characters phenomenal writing this was a EPIC page turner !