Overview

Things To Do Before The End Of The World: Emily Barr

Genre: YA | Contemporary | Thriller

Length: 320 Pages Rating: 4 Stars

Published: by Penguin on May 6, 2021

Synopsis

One minute you’re walking in the park, hiding from a party. Then you discover that the next nine months will probably be your last. Everyone’s last. You realise that you happen to be alive at the time when your species becomes extinct.
You have to decide whether to go with it meekly like you usually do, or to do something brave, to live your last months with all the energy and bravery you can muster, to rage against the dying of the light.

Olivia struggles to live her real life as fully as she wants to. She plans out conversations and events in her head but actually doing them and interacting with other people is hard. When the news breaks that humans have done such damage to the earth that there’s only nine months of safe air left everybody makes bucket lists and starts living their best lives – everyone, that is, but Olivia who is still struggling to figure out who she wants to be.

Then out of the blue comes contact from a long-lost cousin Olivia didn’t even know exsisted. Natasha is everything Olivia wants to be and more. And as the girls meet up for their last summer on earth Olivia finds Natasha’s ease and self-confidence having a effect on her. But what if Natasha isn’t everything she first appears to be . . . ?

Tour Info

I received this book to read and review as part of a tour organised by the @The_WriteReads tours team.  

First Impressions

I’ve always loved dystopian books, but a book set in a pre-dystopian setting was just something that I didn’t know that I needed. I don’t know if it’s due to my love of the genre, or the fact that last year was very nearly our own real life pre-dystopian setting, but Things To Do Before The End Of The World was exactly the sort of book I needed in my life.

Review

Having gone through 2020, I’m sure we all had moments where we felt like we were living in the world Barr creates for her story. Points where we felt the world was ending, so we might as well get into certain hobbies, break bad habits, or repair strained relationships, while at the same time, trying to keep things as normal as possible. I think that if I had read this book before living through 2020, I might have thought that the beginning where Olivia’s just living her life as normally as possible to be boring, but if we’re being honest, that’s pretty much what most of us did. In fact, it wasn’t until her cousin, Natasha shows up in Spain that things start to get interesting.

I loved the dichotomy between OIivia and Natasha that’s set up in the middle section of the book. Olivia wants to just enjoy what she believes to be her last vacation with her family before the world ends, while Natasha seemingly just wants to make Olivia into someone that she’s not. While the two girls wouldn’t really be considered perfect matches, their differences make them the perfect match to tell this story. In fact, their relationship while in Spain almost reminded me of a few of my friendships while I was working for Disney. I don’t know what I would have done if not for the friends who dragged me out of my comfort zone.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that there is a twist in this story that I absolutely did not see coming until it was far too late. While part of me wishes that there had been a bit more build to the twist, I still felt as though it had a strong effect. In fact, it was so strong an effect, that I had to stop reading for a bit in order to collect myself. I also wish that more time had been spent on Olivia trying to figure out how she’s going to solve the problem that the twist creates.

Rating & Final Thoughts

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Overall, I loved this book. It was lighthearted, and at times pretty funny (just wait until you read about Olivia’s tomatoes and why she named her favorite one Harry Potter). It was the perfect book to read after having survived the world ending in 2020. I’ll definitely have to check out more of Emily Barr’s books in the future.