All The Ways The World Can End

Our Review

All The Ways The World Can End was a massive disappointment. I read it on my kindle and I tried to make it to at least 50% of the way through but I ended up giving up on it at around 20% of the way through.

The characters were self-obsessed and selfish and had no special characteristics to entice the reader into their story. The protagonist, Lenny, was very annoying and chaotic. I couldn’t bring myself to engage with her self-obsessed drivel.

My other issue is that Lenny has had her obsession with the world ending since the age of seven and clearly doesn’t make any attempts to hide it but nobody has made any attempt to help her or even shows any form of concern for her behaviour.

Her sister Emma and their mother were just utterly self-absorbed and generally awful people. Her sister is too busy partying to be worried about the fact that her dad has cancer and their mother seems more pre-occupied with her job.

It just wasn’t what I expected from it at all. I thought it sounded like the kind of book I would love.

The book has a promising start. It begins with a list of “All The Ways The World Can End” and “Not As Deadly, But Definitely Make It Suck To Be Alive.”

“My dad had turned into a nocturnal creature. Some rare half-owl, half-lemur, with a majestic wingspan but blood shot eyes, shredding grey wisps of himself everywhere.

‘Fancy meeting you here,’ he said when I walked into my parents’ bedroom with his morning coffee. No matter how many hours he’d been up starring at the shadowy walls, Dad never let on how lonely or exhausted he felt. Only his slow red-rimmed blinks gave him away.”

Her mum has all sorts of random theories on how to cure he dads cancer. Clearly it is just her way of coping with it.

“Going raw was mom’s newest theory about how to cure cancer and save the world. Before that it was eating cloves of garlic and trashing our microwave. Before that it was getting rid of all wheat, meat, corn, sugar, and laundry detergents in our house. At one point we boiled all our water and turned off all our electronics (that lasted exactly three hours.)"

Passages like this gave me a ray of hope that actually this book could turn out to be ok but sadly I was mistaken. The premise of the book was good but the reality sadly failed to live up to it.

Our Final Rating...

Sun, 11th June 2017