Astounding.

A novel about family, friendship, forgiveness, grief, hope, loss, and most of all, love.

Dave is a father, a widow, and a doomsday prepper (for good reason, truth be told). He is also on the autism spectrum, thus he thinks and reacts to situations differently than most. His daughter Cleo is fifteen, is struggling to cope with life, and is desperately trying to figure out who she is. Jana, Dave’s wife, and Cleo’s mom, died suddenly, and both have to figure out a new normal, and quite frankly, it has left them both reeling.

How do you talk about something that you don’t understand? Especially when talking and feeling is not something that comes naturally? How do you figure out who you are, when there’s no one to show you the way?

A book that explores so many important subjects and explores them with grace and absolute perfection. Ways the World Could End is character-driven fiction, which I truly adored.
4.65 stars

A buddy read with Kaceey that we both loved desperately.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the alc.

*received for free from netgalley for honest review* wasn't sure what to expect and knew this would be a hit or miss, turns out it was pretty good! knew i would like it about 5mins after staring it, would reread.

I don't think this one was for me. I couldn't really get into it and ended up deciding to DNF it pretty early on. Thank you for the opportunity to review it.

Fifteen year old Cleo and her dad, Dave, have had a difficult year after the death of Jana, the mom, wife, and rock of the family. Dave has autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and sees the world differently than most. His current hobby is doomsday prepping and he’s slightly obsessed with the number of ways the world could end. In the meantime, he’s trying to navigate life with a teenage daughter who may or may not have a new girlfriend.
Told from both Dave and Cleo’s POVs, the novel has two very distinct voices and gives a full picture of their lives. As the novel progresses, we not only discover the cause of Jana’s death, but how they come to terms and heal from it. It’s thought provoking and emotional and gave me all the feels.
•
•
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Dave is a single dad raising Cleo, his smart, intuitive, far mature beyond her years teenaged daughter. Things were much easier before Jana, his wife left them. He lives with Asperger’s and does all he can to keep his life orderly and very predictable. It is an absolute necessity to his well being. To keep them safe (in his mind) he moves them to a very isolated home. The less interaction with people the better and it gave him the ability to explore and indulge his obsession of preparing for the end of the world. Cleo understands her father, but wants more out of life and when new neighbors move in it freaks Dave out and intrigues Cleo. We go along the well written journey with them while the metabolize and deal with stress, grief, loss, trying to fit in when your world had changed so dramatically and feels as if it collapsing, trying to figure out how to move forward while your brain isn’t an active participant to change. An interesting well written story. You can surely tell that this author did a lot of research on her subject matter. Not the easiest listen (or read), but a worthwhile one. Very good narration added to the experience.

Fifteen-year-old Cleo lost her mom a year ago, so now it is just her and her dad, Dave. Dave has Asperger’s and feels like he has no idea what he is doing, raising Cleo; things were much simpler and better when Jana was around. He spends his free time on his new obsession of doomsday prepping and moves to a secluded location. When a new mom and daughter move in next door, Cleo is intrigued, but Dave is not. Cleo and Dave need to process what happened to Jana and determine how to move forward.

This story jumps back and forth between Dave’s and Cleo’s points of view. I liked how each of Dave’s chapters started with ways the world could end. The book handles a lot of heavy topics without becoming morbid. I loved the relationships between the characters and seeing them grow over the course of the book. Stephanie Willing and Pete Cross did a phenomenal job narrating the audiobook; I highly recommend checking out the book in this format!

Many thanks to NetGalley for providing me an audio ARC of this book.

I LOVED this book. The story sucks you in right from the start and you grow to love the characters more and more as their stories unfold and their lives are exposed. The premise of this story is almost unimaginable-but written in a sympathetic and believable way. Your heart breaks for everyone.

Highly recommend!!!

Thank you to Net Galley for this arc

Quite an interesting YA novel.

Ways the World Could End is about a father and a daughter and their grief after losing Jana (wife/mom). It is also about Aspergers, coming of age, love, and forgiveness.

The audiobook is narrated by Stephanie Willing and Pete Cross. Both did a wonderful job in giving life to these wonderful characters.

Each chapter that begins with Dave starts with him narrating the many ways the world could end. This is the reason why he has a bunker stocked with everything he might need to keep himself and his daughter, Cleo alive.

You see Dave has Asperger's and dealing with people is a problem. After Jana died, he moved himself and Cleo to a remote area in the hills of San Juan Capistrano where he can have more control. He knows that he has to let Cleo live her life but he doesn't need to like it. So when Cleo strikes a friendship with Edie, a new girl recently transferred from another school, Dave has to tolerate her.

Cleo is almost sixteen. She misses her mother terribly. Jana was not only her mom but her friend. She was able to tell her mother everything including her new feelings towards girls. Cleo knows of her father's Aspergers and she knows how to help him thanks to Jana. She is a very smart and thoughtful teenager. She seems mature for her age but life might have something to do with it. Meeting Edie has been the one positive she wasn't expecting.

I truly enjoyed Ways the World Could End. I liked that in the end, forgiveness was a big statement. I would say that the one thing that I wasn't too happy with was the way sometimes Dave came across. In some instances, he sounded selfish and robotic. Thankfully most of the time, he sounded like a worried dad grieving the loss of his wife.

Cliffhanger: No

4/5 Fangs

A complimentary copy was provided by Dreamscape Media via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I liked the story line, the unknown way that Cleos mom died initially and that it was LGBTQ+ friendly. Kim Hooper did an excellent just with this book and I enjoyed the alternating between Dave and Cleo. I think it's important to note that Hooper does an excellent job speaking about autism as well. I liked the narrators for the audiobook as well. I will say this is the first book that speaks a little bit about C-19 that I didn't mins. Others were hard to get into.

I was hesitant about this one. Realistic fiction is sometimes to painful to read so basically I was weary. It’s told from father and daughter POVs. There’s a big life event in this story. Many things, uncomfortable things are tackled in this novel. I couldn’t imagine dealing with some of the stuff this family had to face but enjoyed it overall.
I fell hard for Dave and Cleo. I couldn’t help but root for them and hoped that they’d find their way through it all.
I chose to listen to this book on audio and loved Stephanie Willing & Pete Cross narrating this. They were awesome.
Thanks Dreamscape Media via Netgalley.

Ways this could be better.

With a rating of 4. 4 on Goodreads I hadn't read a totally different story than everyone else did.

If it didn't present a narrow image of what a character with Asperger's Syndrome looks like.

If it didn't feel like the author knew someone diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, did a ton of reading on it, and then created a character around what she learned (is what she did do) by reducing the character to a robotic checklist of symptoms that felt forced on me.

If it didn't feel like all the ways, Jana and Cleo wanted to change Dave rather than accept that his brain works differently from theirs and he experiences the world differently.

If, for the first 100 pages, Dave wasn't telling us all the ways Jana defined him by his disorder and how she could identify with all his flaws because of the label. According to Jana and Cleo, everything Dave likes, feels, his choices, and how he behaves are because of his disorder. Some of the things Jana tells him are "you are a robot," "your behavior is not typical," "read the room," "be nice, "and "try not to embarrass" them. He innocently tells us that Jana treats him like an idiot, and he sees Jana and Cleo looking at him like they are assessing a monkey in a zoo. I know I am sensitive, but this was too much for me. It felt like a list of all his personality deficits and Jana's grievances replaying in my head repeatedly. I felt sad for Dave.

If it wasn't ok for Jana and Cleo say anything, they wanted to Dave without considering his feeling because it's difficult to hurt his feelings.

If it wasn't for all the ways, I decided not to add to the list because it feels like I am ranting.

Ways I did enjoy listening to the story.

I liked how Kim Hooper slowly reveals how Jana died and how forgiveness is explored from Cleo's POV. She created enough suspense and questions to keep me wanting to listen and discover what happened and I like how things wrapped up.

I liked Cleo's story as she tries to figure out who she is and her place in the world as she navigates life without his mother. Even though I thought she was an annoying teenager who needed to be nicer to her Dad and her character falls into some stereotypes around her sexuality, I felt her chapters were the best part of the story.

I enjoyed listening to the story and thought both narrators did a good job.

From the summary, "They were both better off when Jana was around." In the end, I thought they both were better off without Jana, and that was the strongest message I got from this story. Good thing this is fiction.

Ways The World Could End, by Kim Hooper is a story about Dave widowed father to Cleo his teenage daughter. Dave sees the world differently than most, he lives with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) and he’s a “Doomsday Prepper”.

Dave, with wife Janna passed away, has no idea what he’s doing when it comes to raising his fifteen-year-old daughter, Cleo. She also feels like he has no idea what he’s doing, especially now without her mother.

This story shows us grief, friendship, and love―the love between parents and children, between spouses, between teenagers, and between strangers. It is a story that requires us to consider the bounds of forgiveness, what we’re willing and not willing to forgive, and reminds us that often the hardest thing to forgive is ourselves.

This was an audio book, and was very well read by the narrators.

I listened to the audiobook, and it was lovely. The narrators did a great job with voicing the different characters, and it really drew me into the story.

This book made me feel so many things in a good way. It brought me through grief, love, and forgiveness from different perspectives. I especially enjoyed the forgiveness aspects because it showed the hope that can eventually come after grief. It made me think about my own marriage and friendships. This book felt so human with how it portrayed its characters with both their strengths and their flaws and how they related to one another.

I agree with another reviewer that the chapters from Chleo’s perspective have a YA feel. But I really liked Cleo, and don’t mind reading YA books. I like hearing people grow comfortable with themselves and think through who they are and want to be.

I really enjoyed the storytelling method. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that switched point of views over the book, but it was done well. It especially helped that the audiobook switched voice actors when the point of view changed.

This was the first book I’ve read from Kim Hooper, but it makes me want to check out her other books. I also wanted to thank the publisher and Dreamscape Media for providing me an ARC through NetGalley.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the free audiobook version in exchange for an honest review. This audiobook was not to my liking. The narrator for Dave’s story had a very robotic voice, presumably because Dave had Asperger’s. The vice droned and I actually had to speed the voice up, which helped a little. The female narrator had an amiable voice. I found the story depressing ( I should have realized by the title) and more appropriate as a YA novel.

I absolutely loved this audiobook. A wide range of diverse characters that were very well developed. I thought the exploration of Dave as a father with ASD was well done and felt very believable to me. I like how each chapter is framed with a way that the world could end (side note.....these bleak yet totally realistic possibilities may be hard to handle for some), and how it helps to explain Dave's character in a unique fashion. I also thought that the exploration of Cleo's grief as well as her sexual identity were well done. Overall, this book is a well done look at how different people experience and process grief. Highly recommend!

Cleo is missing her mother. She’s what tied the family together and now it’s just her and her dad, Dave, who has Asperger’s and struggles to connect with her. Jana was the buffer, what held them together. And now Dave obsesses with doomsday prepping, and controlling every minute of their lives since Jana left - and Cleo feels lost. Both struggle to find themselves without her.⁣
⁣
Until the new girl moves in down the street.⁣
⁣
Edie sort of unknowingly shakes up everything. And soon they must confront their past and try to move forward - but there’s so much forgiveness that needs to happen before they can move on in this new, unknown world that both struggle to navigate.⁣
⁣
I LOVE Kim Hooper’s books - this is my third and also my third 5 star read. She tackles the most complicated of subjects in the most delicate and thoughtful of ways that squeeze your heart with words that embrace you in a giant emotional hug. Dave and Cleo are two characters I won’t soon forget - the journey they take is equally heartwarming and funny, as it is heartbreaking and incredibly sweet.⁣
⁣
I loved this both in print and audio. It’s an incredible story of forgiveness, love, friendship, grief, and self-discovery.

This wasn’t a read I wouldn’t normally pick up. The blurb sounded a bit too contemporary, with hints of YA and coming of age. All themes that don’t normally gel well for me.

But I loved the previous book by this author, No Hiding in Boise so I put all concerns aside and jumped in! A wise choice on my part! What an amazing read (audio) this turned out to be!

Dave and his daughter Cleo are putting their lives back together without the glue that held them together. Her name was Jana, and her absence is felt in everything they do.

Dave has always relied on Jana to help him navigate the world and people around him. An interpreter of sorts. Dave has Asperger's, and it’s the confusing little nuances of everyone’s behaviors he has trouble deciphering.

Cleo is fifteen and just discovering herself and her sexuality. Of course Jana isn’t there to share her problems with. And Dad…well, looking to him for answers is simply out of the question. Cleo realizes it’s up to her to find her way on her own. But let’s not forget, she is one amazing girl!

I adored both characters as they put their lives back together and moving forward.

Both narrators did an amazing job on the audio version, bringing both characters to vivid life.

Kim Hooper has once again delivered a five-star read! I highly recommend!

A buddy read with Susanne that we both loved and couldn’t stop talking about!

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media

Another win by Kim Hooper!! I loved her last book and this one was another insightful, feel good and so relatable read. A story about a neurodivergent dad and a bisexual teen girl trying to overcome the loss of their wife/mother. Told in alternating perspectives between the father and daughter, I loved getting to see the world through each character's eyes as they try to bridge their differences and come together when the woman that linked them is no longer alive. Full of heart and humor, I fell in love with these characters and really enjoyed this story on audio narrated by Stephanie Willing & Pete Cross. Much thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my ALC!

While browsing through NetGalley I stumbled upon Ways the World Could End by Kim Hooper. I knew nothing about this book or the author but my NetGalley finger requested it. I’m glad that I did!

Publication Date: May 10, 2022
 
Synopsis :
Dave: single father with Asperger’s, can think of hundreds of tragic ways the world could end and sees the world differently, no idea what he is doing when raising his teenage daughter.

Cleo, 15, finding her authentic self, emotional, missing her mom, understanding towards her dad’s emotional limits, but feels that her dad had no idea what he is doing.

Jana-mom, everyone feels that they were better when she was around. What happened to Jana? Who is she really? What secrets has she been keeping?

Edie, the neighbor who moves in next door with her mom and is about to change Dave and Cleo’s lives. Curious about what happened to Jana.

Thoughts:
-Love the relationship between Dave and Cleo. It is heartwarming and real.

-Missing a family member is never easy and the way Dave and Cleo navigate this time are different, yet important.

-The book is based on love. Young love and old love, in its simplistic and most complex ways.

-Dave just made me super anxious about ways the world could end. As if I wasn’t already consumed with the scenarios I created in my own mind!

-Loved the audio book and the dual narration for Dave and Cleo. Well done Stephanie Willing & Pete Cross!!!

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media. This is a book I would not have picked up on my own and now I love it!

Thank you NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for allowing me early access to the audio book version of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

This story is told through alternating perspectives of Dave and his teenage daughter, Cleo, as they begin to piece together their lives without his wife/her mother, Jana. We get to know each of them as individuals coming into their own while simultaneously building their relationship with each other.

When I first began listening to this audiobook, I was immediately considering throwing in the towel simply based on the fact that the male narrator sounded robotic and lacked emotion. The more I considered his voice, the more I thought it would be interesting if the narrator was reading this way in order to bring out the true voice of the character. So, I kept listening. It was soon revealed that the male character, Dave, is on the autism spectrum. Before I knew it, I was loving everything about him.

This is a book about getting to know yourself and building relationships with an underlying message about the many faces of grief. It's the kind of book we all need at some point. I hope it finds you just when you need it most.