We All Looked Up
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4.3 • 29 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
'This generation's The Stand. . . at once troubling, uplifting, scary and heart-wrenching' Andrew Smith, author of Grasshopper Jungle
Before, we let ourselves be defined by labels - the athlete, the outcast, the slacker, the overachiever. But then we all looked up and everything changed. They said the asteroid would be here in two months. That gave us two months to leave our labels behind. Two months to become something bigger than what we'd been, something that would last even after the end. Two months to really live.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Like the best kind of teen movie, We All Looked Up is simultaneously wild and irreverent and touchingly poignant. First-time American author Tommy Wallach (who’s also a talented singer-songwriter) imagines the lives of four Seattle teenagers in the weeks leading up to a predicted asteroid strike that would destroy life as we know it. Wallach’s main characters are familiar high-school types—the precocious artist, the thoughtful jock, the wastoid, and the sick-of-being-good girl—but he inhabits their brains with dazzling clarity. We ripped through this end-days tale, a bittersweet celebration of youthful angst and rebellion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An asteroid named Ardor is on course to destroy the world. As four Seattle teenagers count down the weeks until impact, they wrestle with the meaning of their lives and their possible deaths. Peter, a basketball golden boy, must decide if he should save his sister from her nihilistic boyfriend and whether true love is worth ignoring the status quo. Eliza, a photographer with an unseemly reputation, negotiates her father's cancer diagnosis, her mother's abandonment, and the need to chronicle the chaos erupting around her, while finding herself drawn to Peter. Rounding out the story's rotating voices are Anita, a straight-A student who just wants to sing, and Andy, a slacker who must decide where his loyalties lie and how to handle his dangerous friends. Debut novelist Wallach increases the tension among characters throughout, ending in a shocking climax that resonates with religious symbolism. Stark scenes alternating between anarchy and police states are counterbalanced by deepening emotional ties and ethical dilemmas, creating a novel that asks far bigger questions than it answers. Ages 14 up.
