Book Report 1

SYNOPSIS —

“This is Where It Ends,” by Marieke Nikamp is a story about what goes down at Opportunity High School in a span of 54 minutes. The book is told in four different perspectives and ties in the use of social media every few pages. When a lone gunman locks in the entire high school during an assembly meeting, he blames his feelings and emotions on not being seen or heard in the high school and claims that he was alone his entire time, and blames others for eventually dropping out. This scenario, unfortunately, happened way too often when school was still in-person and resulted in many lives lost.

The five perspectives of this story are told through Claire, Autumn, Tomas, Sylv, and Fareed — all of who have a part in this book where communication is unheard of and unseen.

As mentioned prior, social media, Twitter, and text messages play a partial role in this book. Many times when an occurrence like this happens, confusing messages are sent out and chaos ensues. This is exactly what we begin to see in the beginning of the book. Throughout the span of 54 minutes, people check in on them through social media, tweet at them, news stations tweet at them trying to get the first look at the scene, and last-minute text messages are sent to loved ones.

One thing that frustrated me the most after reading this book was that we never got a first-hand look into Tyler’s brain or his thoughts on why he chose to take the lives of innocent students and faculty members. It only occurred to me after reading front page to back, that the intention of this book was to really focus on how the kids in the auditorium were feeling and how scared they were. The takeaway from this book, looking at it from a communication standpoint, is that we are often misheard. This book, I feel, also lacked depth of emotion towards the end and the only real takeaway I got was that the shooter was evil and had little to no remorse. Going forward in the future, if authors do choose to write on a topic that is so heavy on the heart for many, I would hope to receive both sides of the narrative and show more sympathy to the lives that were innocently lost.

TAKEAWAYS —

Some of the takeaways I had from reading this book were that relationships with others matter and how you speak to others matters as well.

It was an extremely upsetting book to read, given the touchy subject. With that being said, it’s also one that is a reality. I’ve written a few papers on gun violence and unfortunately, gun violence in school, when school was in person, was all too common.

As a final score of this book, I would give it an 8/10. It could have used more social media usage, but for a fiction book, I think it did a decent job.