With the American gun laws still present, with innocents getting killed all around the world by these monstruous weapons, it’s only right that a book about a gun-wielding killer would trickle it’s way into the young adult genre.

This book is important to read. It’s important that’s it’s read by everyone. Yes, it’s a young adult book but it shows us the horrors of what happens at a school shooting, it shows us how families grieve and mourn the loss of their children who were taken away from them too early. This is a feeling that parents should never feel.

10:00 a.m. The principal of Opportunity 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 a.m. The auditorium doors won’t open.

10:05 a.m. Someone starts shooting.

Told from four different perspectives over the span of fifty-four harrowing minutes, terror reigns as one student’s calculated revenge turns into the ultimate game of survival.

This book isn’t about a school shooting. Now you may be thinking ‘well why does the blurb make out it is then?’ Technically, yes: This is Where it Ends is about someone walking into a school and picking off people one by one. But this book is also about how the shootings affect the families, the fellow students, the actual shooter. This book takes us into the minds of a few characters as we see them go through things that no one should have to go through.

I felt as if the book was slow for the first twenty pages. I know that Nijkamp was laying down the foundations of the different characters and making us see how the characters link in with each other, but I felt like I was trudging through mud when I was reading it.

As soon as the shooting started, that’s when I was on the edge of my seat, gripping onto the book so hard and flicking through the pages as fast as I could so that I could finish the book.

I wasn’t that shocked by the identity of the shooter. I could understand where they were coming from to a certain extent when they gave their reason for killing members of the school but… It didn’t seem like a big enough reason.

“You can’t always keep your loved ones with you. You can’t always settle your life in one place. The world was made to change. But as long as you cherish the memories and make new ones along on the way, no matter where you are, you’ll always be at home.”

– Marieke Nijkamp, This Is Where It Ends

Can we just talk about how eye-catching and heart-stopping the front cover is? It’s so simple yet so devasting. It’s obivious just from looking at it what the books is about. We know all to well in recent years what a school shooting is.

As much as I loved the story and three of the characters, I cannot say the same about the character of Claire. What was the point of her? Apart from her affiliation with the shooter? She was stuck outside the entire time and did nothing. When I saw her name at the top of her chapters, I wanted to skip past them because I knew that nothing would be happening, but I decided not to skip them and read about how much she wanted to help the people inside. YOU ARE NOT INSIDE. DEAL WITH IT.

Apart from Claire and the slow beginning, this book was absolutely amazing and I thoroughly recommend that everyone read this. It’s so eye-opening and insanely upsetting to read because you know that these school shooting happen far too often in our world. 

Please read this book and I hope that everyone realises how dangerous guns are and how they shouldn’t be put in the hands of the wrong people.

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