October 28, 2019
Elle’s grandfather is a “prepper” who stages drills and stockpiles food and supplies to survive unspecified, inevitable cataclysmic events. The seventh grader becomes a convert to his cause after embracing online posts by a sacked Harvard astronomer who predicts that an asteroid will soon destroy Earth. Elle convinces her kind and witty best friend, Mack, who is blind, to help her launch a clandestine survival club at school, and she also teams up with her snippety former nemesis, Londyn, to publish the Doomsday Express newsletter to prepare their peers for the imminent Armageddon. Though the overwrought, single-thread plot begins to strain credibility and patience, McAnulty (The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl) adds substantial layers to the story with insights into her emotionally vulnerable protagonists’ credence in the pending apocalypse: Elle reasons it will save her from braving school without Mack, who is transferring to a school for the blind; Londyn hopes it will reunite her separated parents. Throughout, snippets of sly humor lighten the novel’s potential darkness, as when Elle muses, “I think asteroids have a way of wiping out middle school drama. It’s one of the plus sides of the end of the world.” Ages 8–12.