I think there's something to be said about an author who can take some of the oldest, cliche ideas and create something new out of them. As the opening quote suggests, the strength of these characters is that it's easy to find little bits of ourselves in all of them - or so I believe. In the author's hands, the jock, the slut, the slacker and the aloof nerd become three-dimensional human beings, each with aspirations, desires and insecurities of their own. Wallach takes the traditional high school cliques and stereotypes and breathes humanity into them.

and yet this book is so much more than the sum of its parts.įirstly, the characters are fantastic. It does have a lot of high school politics, and it is about the coming apocalypse. The cover is lovely and I think that might have something to do with why I was so drawn to this book, despite the description that seemed to be indirectly promising the equivalent of a bad high school drama meets cheesy action movie, complete with possible Armageddon-style asteroid collision. I didn't realise I was expecting this book to not be very good until it surprised me. You read them, and suddenly you're a little bit less alone in the world. They talk about things you'd always thought about, but that you didn't think anyone else had thought about. The best books, they don't talk about things you never thought about before.

And they all looked up