REVIEW: This Is Where It Ends by Marieke Nijkamp

Title: This Is Where It Ends

Author: Marieke Nijkamp

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Publication Date:January 5th 2016

Part of A Series?: Standalone:)

I Got A Copy Through: The Publisher Via Netgalley

Blurb Description: 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**

‘“You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you?”

“I have. And one day, I’ll show the world. And they’ll never forget me.

And now the school is his battleground.’

Imagine listening to an extremely boring lecture in your school; sitting in those uncomfortable seats with your friends, talking and whispering. Doing pretty much anything other than actually listening to those speeches that drone on forever.

Imagine your everyday life. Boring, uneventful, normal.

Now imagine someone you know standing up, revolver in hand with their morals and compassion flying loose like they never existed. Imagine a trigger happy person with just one agenda – revenge.

“Today, all of you belong to me.” The outside world no longer matters.

Told in varying perspectives, This Is Where It Ends takes us a beautifully portrayed emotional rollercoaster that will leave us gasping for a breath of normality once it’s over. This Is Where It Ends is about a boy that felt that nobody understood him; that everybody had stolen something from him and that it was him against the world and it’s told in the perspectives of these people- the ones that he thinks abandoned him of left him alone. This Is Where Ends is about this one place that you don’t realize is home to you – and how that one place; the one you grew up in – is what makes you or breaks you.

“We all hate to love Opportunity High and love to hate it. We can’t wait to graduate, but we don’t want to leave. This school is special, from the stupid bright-red bricks that make the building look modern and out of place, to our school mascot: the Ocelot of Opportunity.”

Told in a span of fifty four short and yet long minutes- a time period too short to lose that many loved ones, but too long to survive through anyway, This Is Where It Ends is simply heart breaking. It shows us what life really is, how we think we have time but in the end, we never really know anything. This Is Where It Ends is gorgeous, it’s soulful, and it’s real. It’s everything I thought it would be, everything that the author probably envisioned it to be- maybe even more.

I couldn’t give a book of this genre a higher recommendation- READ IT!