Review #190: We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


“When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.”

----Thomas Merton, one of the most influential Catholic authors of the 20th century

Tommy Wallach, a Brooklyn-based writer and musician, pens his debut coming-of-age novel, called We All Looked Up that revolves around the lives of four high school teenagers when faced the apocalypse.





Synopsis:

Four high school seniors put their hopes, hearts, and humanity on the line as an asteroid hurtles toward Earth in this contemporary novel.

They always say that high school is the best time of your life.

Peter, the star basketball player at his school, is worried “they” might actually be right. Meanwhile Eliza can’t wait to escape Seattle—and her reputation—and perfect-on-paper Anita wonders if admission to Princeton is worth the price of abandoning her real dreams. Andy, for his part, doesn’t understand all the fuss about college and career—the future can wait.

Or can it? Because it turns out the future is hurtling through space with the potential to wipe out life on Earth. As these four seniors—along with the rest of the planet—wait to see what damage an asteroid will cause, they must abandon all thoughts of the future and decide how they’re going to spend what remains of the present.


This is an extremely ardent and thought-provoking novel that forces you to realize the whole situation, that the author fictionally created in his story, in a real way and not only that these four teenagers will simply make you to keep turning the pages of the book until the very last page.

Four teenagers, Andy, Eliza, Anita and Peter, from Seattle are thrown together when the world is nearing it's end and they have hardly few weeks to live till the asteroid, Ardor hits the Earth. The whole world turns into a circus of chaos, riots, lawlessness, violence, murders, fights with drug lords, and general "screw-it" attitude in almost every human alive on this planet.

But in this post-apocalyptic situation, these four teenagers don't want to be who they are anymore. Like Andy, the slacker, doesn't want to grow up and live his whole life without any responsibilities, Anita, the over-achiever, doesn't want to the perfect girl for her daddy, Eliza, the slut, doesn't want to be a slut anymore and Peter, the athlete, is bored of being a teenager and fears that he won't be able to experience anything further. So what happens next and how they evolve from their own personalities is something that you can't really miss.

For the record, this book is not about a bunch of high school stereotypes, instead the author have focused on the theme of humanity, and the behavioral aspect of the humans in a crisis period, in a greater way. The growing tension on the wake of an asteroid-hitting-the-earth is very evident with the progress of the story and the author have portrayed that side of the human nature either in a general way or through these four perfect-to-unperfect-teenagers POV very strikingly and that's what made me feel the rising heat, tension and violence in a post-apocalyptic world.

The writing is very articulate and the author have layered his plot with a myriad of intricate descriptions. Moreover, the visual imagery of all those violence and religious indifference and confusion is quite strongly depicted in the book. The prose is really very fast, as the possibility of the asteroid hitting the earth came closer and closer, I felt more engaged to the book. The narrative style is more like dark, proverbial yet catchy.

The characters play a huge role in this book. With each day getting closer to the apocalypse, the characters evolve from peer-labelled-teenagers into something really wonderful. I mean there's a big difference in these teenagers' demeanor at the beginning of the book and at the end of the book. Moreover, the author gives us enough space to connect with these teenagers through their issues with being labelled and their desires to live life in a better way.

The author vividly drew the realism in these teenager's issues and in their lives, moreover it's very easy for some of us to relate and contemplate with these characters. From sexuality to ethnicity to relationship drama to torn-up background to drug usage, the author have etched them with every possible flaw, thus making them very realistic.

The author leaves us with a vague and unpredictable climax, I mean he wants us to use our own imagination to think the inevitable or the possibility of an end of the world. So that might not be a favorite thing with some readers, even me too, and as a result, I believe it would have been better if the author ended in a concrete way, instead leaving us hanging with our own minds and imaginative skills.


Verdict: A must read heart-wrenching, dark and witty YA novel that is set in a post-apocalyptic world.

Courtesy: Thanks to the author, Tommy Wallach's, publicist, for providing me with a copy of the book, in return for an honest review.
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Author Info:
Tommy Wallach is a Brooklyn-based writer and musician. His first novel, We All Looked Up, will be published by Simon and Schuster in April 2015. His work has appeared in many nice magazines, such as McSweeney's, Tin House, and Wired. He has released an EP with Decca Records, and will be independently putting out an LP in Spring 2014. He also makes music videos, including one that was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum. 
Visit him here 


Book Purchase Links:

• Amazon US 
• Amazon India