Told through the eyes of four students This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp is an unflinching look at what it’s like to be caught up in a high school shooting. As the tagline states, everyone has a reason to fear the boy with the gun.
The lives of Autumn, Claire, Sylv, and Tomas are already intertwined but there is no escaping their connections once Tyler Browne starts shooting. Their lives and the lives of the wider community will be changed beyond recognition by his actions.
Spanning 54 minutes, This Is Where It Ends is both fast paced and never ending, which is how I imagine being caught in a traumatic situation feels. Every moment feels like a lifetime, yet things are actually happening quite quickly.
We never see things from Tyler’s point of view. As destruction and devastation is going on around them various characters try to understand what lead to this point, but we never really learn the truth.
I respect this; I read it as Nijkamp’s way of showing that we don’t get to understand the reasons why something so awful happens. Sometimes there’s a concrete reason. Sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes the real reason is never truly known or understood. Sometimes all we are left with is a bunch of speculation and what ifs.
Nijkamp’s storytelling is simplistic yet powerful, she doesn’t shy away from difficult topics or diverse characters. Here we have LGBTQ+ characters, people of colour and people with chronic illnesses. This may seem like a lot when written down as a list, but that’s because these characters are so often missing from other stories. Some characters work better than others, just because for me some were better developed than others.
There is no doubt that some people will view This Is Where It Ends as a controversial book. I think it’s a compelling and necessary read.