This Is Where It Ends – Marieke Nijkamp

Trigger Warning: guns/shooting in a school area/suicide (my heart goes out to all of the families that lost loved ones during the recent events of 2022. please do not take this book as criticism or slander to any of the affected.)

okay. okay, okay, okay.
I can’t really begin to intervene in the strange book that is this…book. Does that make sense? I don’t know if that makes sense. Basically I meant that this book was maybe the worst not best read of this year…

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Firstly, let’s rate the writing. This book had such an amazing thought put into it but had barely hit the tip of the iceberg when it came to execution. I had read the little synopsis on the back but no- and to think I had such high hopes for this book and the plot. The subject had focused on a school shooting, which I think at this time in the cluster of months is pretty topical and important. I expected a story that would actually convince some readers and bloggers to maybe take action and get some part of the government to take control of the gun policies we have. Unfortunately, this book, and not even the events that have happened, have been able to let the situation die down to a near nothing occurrence. ARGh, Anyways, while I’m sure that this is now an extremely controversial topic to put in a YA novel, this book didn’t exactly exceed my expectation of it. It had the opportunity to explore so many questions that come inevitably following a tragedy such as a school shooting, but it let those questions remain unanswered.

The psychology between events like these are morbidly intriguing; the people that committed said acts are deeply complex, and not to be taken lightly in exploration. AND SOMEHOW this book boils the entire reason why the shooter had killed so many of his classmates is simply because he. was. eViL. Boom. Simple. That’s it, right? That must be it.

Yeah, I’m not entirely sure. What kind of person wakes up, has their normal hygienic morning routine, has their extravagant pancakes with strawberry cream cheese breakfast, and then goes, “you know what I haven’t done recently? shot up my high school and then get my sister to break her heart over my cruel self.” Even if the author had a MINUTE of Wikipedia research on her tabs of google, or firefox, or whatever search engine she was using,

This book and its characters were all so black and white. There were no shades of gray at ALL in this book. The victims who were trapped in the assembly room were all somehow great, perfect, amazing, etc. in their own way. It’s like that’s why they weren’t even memorable. none of them had any remarkable traits that made me cry about if they died.

No, rather these characters were about as memorable as wet cardboard…
(but at least cardboard has DIMENSION.)

In real life, I’m assuming that victims and hostages have some kind of depth and clarity in their lives. They have flaws, imperfections that make them easier to remember because they aren’t just robots living human lives. They would have hopes and fears and desires, not just an urge to forget everything and make their sole purpose in life from there on out to escape a place they’re kept in against their will. TBF it isn’t bad that they have that, but at least give them some sort of aspirations that they could (possibly) look forward to if and when they escape the place, or what the next steps should be.

Marieke (author) doesn’t really show that. Rather, they’re about as memorable as nothing.. I can’t even remember their deaths because they were all so similar – not in the way they were killed, but why even were those people specific victims. Generically speaking, the author only killed off the characters that the antagonist “didn’t like” and “got doubted from”. Like, give at least some manic aspect…

I think it was a crime that the author portrayed victims that way; however, the antagonist was just as horribly (if not worse) described.

the shooter is bad and evil. he was raised to become bad and evil. his legacy was bad and evil. everything about him, including his death was bad. and. evil.

Sound about accurate? Our highly esteemed (no i’m kidding, seriously) shooter, Tyler, was incredibly monotone and his reasons to, well, shoot, were just as terrible.
Dare I say, criminals/ruffians always have some sort of complex reason to do something. Maybe a childhood memory prompted them, or it was them feeling that it can only become worse from there on out. I’m sure the majority of people like reading crime fiction or enjoy crime documentaries/podcasts do so primarily because of the fascinating motivation of the act. Most of the books I like reading are murder mysteries because of the elaborate plots, backstories, and character personas overall.

Tyler’s personality and the justifications he has are about as sharp as a bowling ball. He did it because he wanted to be feared, he wanted control, he wanted to seem visible and gain attention. But attention that he could’ve otherwise gotten from something better? NO. His ideals were to murder and then be recognized as a complete psychopath from everyone he used to know. Most people kill because of real or imagined slight that was amplified enough to fuel their rage to want to kill. They kill because they were abused, over and over, until the rubber band of their mind snap

What I think would have really made this book great is if it had not only focused on the protagonists, but also the antagonist. Though there’s some musing on the nature of his evil, I felt like it was underdeveloped. There was a great opportunity there to consider how a teenager could turn into this evil monster that comes to murder his peers in cold blood. I love when books explore that uncomfortable notion that the division between good and evil is not so stark, and here was an opportunity to do so in a realistic, and unfortunately plausible, setting.

Also though, let’s talk about the diversity. A quick lesson in writing.

First of all, yeah, it’s great to have characters of different diversities in a book- but be realistic, PLEASE. Most of the time, people who live in suburban cities might have one race/ethnicity populating or overcoming others. It’s quite arbitrary to write about every single citizen of every single country when you should be focusing more on exactly the research on the backgrounds of wherever this book would take place. But maybe it’s just me…

It seemed that the majority of this story actually occurs through flashbacks (bit of a pet peeve, is it not?), and the present plot was fairly static, in my opinion, until about 85-97% of the way through the book. The course of the story is essentially that someone starts shooting, there’s multiple multiple flashbacks, a scene in the present every so often that is focused on mostly dialogue between characters, more flashbacks, and then the climax/falling action/ending. I’m in no way suggesting that this format suggests a “bad book”, it’s just the polar opposite of what I like to read.

Anyways, I refuse to write anymore about this book (the irony is this is one hell of a long review). Not sure what the backstory was to write this book, but honestly? I didn’t think it was all that great.