Review: This is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp

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
The auditorium doors won't open.

10:05
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.

My Review: 5 Stars

I read this book in one day, and am so impressed by it.  I couldn't put it down because I had to know if characters would make it out alive.  I loved so many of the characters quickly, and I wanted them all to live.  And I won't spoil who died, but I will say, not everybody makes it out alive, including characters that I cared about.  This book was heartbreaking, but I still loved it.

This was told from the perspective of 4 main characters.  It alternated POVs between them.  One of the narrators is Autumn, the sister of the shooter.  She is passionate about dance and wants to go to school for it.  She is dating Sylv, who is another one of the POV characters.  Due to living in a probably close-minded small town, their relationship is secret from pretty much everyone.  Instead, people think they are best friends.  Another POV character is Tomas, Sylv's twin brother.  He is not there during the shooting because he had been sent to the principal's office with a friend.  He and his friend, Fareed, decide to try to let people out of the auditorium by getting the doors unlocked.  The fourth POV character is Claire.  She isn't at the assembly due to track practice, but her brother Matt is in the auditorium.  She and her friend Chris work on finding the police and helping people out. 

Tyler was the shooter, and he was awful.  There were hints in the flashbacks of how he wasn't always a bad guy in the past, but there weren't hints of that in the present.  He murdered so many scared students with literally no reason.  They did nothing to him, other than being there in the auditorium.  I wasn't really sure what his plans were, since it seemed like he basically just was doing this because of things with Autumn and Sylv.  I'm really not sure at all about his end goal.  He had to have realized that this was not a good plan.  I never liked him, and I couldn't even feel sorry for him for bad things that had happened to him, since he was just so awful.

If you like dark YA contemporary, read this book.

Katie