The Great Big One
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
With natural disasters and nuclear war threatening their small town, two twin brothers find themselves enraptured by mysterious music that could change the course of their lives.
Everyone in Clade City knows their days are numbered. The Great Cascadia Earthquake will destroy their hometown and reshape the entire West Coast—if they survive long enough to see it. Nuclear war is increasingly likely. Wildfires. Or another pandemic. To Griff, the daily forecast feels partly cloudy with a chance of apocalyptic horsemen.
Griff’s brother, Leo, and the Lost Coast Preppers claim to be ready. They’ve got a radio station. Luminous underwater monitors. A sweet bunker, and an unsettling plan for “disaster-ready rodents.” But Griff’s more concerned about what he can do before the end times. He’d like to play in a band, for one. Hopefully with Charity Simms. Her singing could make the whole world stop.
When Griff, Leo, and Charity stumble upon a mysterious late-night broadcast, one song changes everything. It’s the best band they’ve ever heard—on a radio signal even the Preppers can’t trace. They vow to find the music, but aren’t prepared for where their search will take them. Or for what they’ll risk, when survival means finding the one thing you cannot live without.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With an ambitious plotline and nuanced characters, Geiger's (Wildman) novel begins as a tense love triangle before veering into a grief-tinged mystery. Like many of the men in coastal Oregon's Clade City, the site of a devastating 1964 tsunami, white 17-year-old twins Griff and Leo Tripp are preppers, spending their free time preparing for a tsunami, nuclear attack, or whatever potential disaster awaits. Normally close, the Tripp siblings' relationship begins to fray as Griff develops feelings for new classmate Charity, a talented singer who is Black and Dominican. Having formed a band with Charity, the twins and fellow prepper Thomas hear an exhilarating musical broadcast picked up on a stray radio frequency. As Leo and Charity begin to investigate the musical puzzle, Griff interprets his ominous feeling of doom as certainty that his charismatic brother will steal Charity's heart, as occurred with a previous crush. Though the writing's intentionally fractured style threatens to scramble the story's momentum, patience pays off in this richly detailed mystery about the terrible catastrophes that even the most ardent prepper cannot anticipate. Ages 14–up.
Customer Reviews
Beautiful yet… Perplexing
The writing style of this novel wasn’t something I’m adjusted to. Might resonate differently with a different reader. I often found myself having to re-read multiple passages to fully understand what exactly I was reading. With some of the passages being something is never did fully understand. However, that doesn’t change that this was an intricately beautiful and haunting story.
It’s follows a set of twin brothers and their small town friends, set in a time period somewhere between current day and a not so distant future. It follows them as they ask the age old teenage question, who am I going to be? The group bonds over a shared love of music that transcends the typical modern day POP songs. Together, they face embarrassment, awkwardness, joy, angst, and ultimately a wildly unexpected deep harrowing loss.
This loss drives the group to break the trust and the expectation of their families, and small town community to chase after the one truly magnificent thing they each have left in their lives.
I felt like I live multiple lives reading through this story, the plot sent me through many hills and valleys. The story taking many wildly unexpected turns. Also, broached into some questionably explicit “romantic” passages, which are not typically within my wheelhouse, that I was quite surprised to find from a YA novel. Unfortunately, due to having to re-read passages to better understand them, I feel like I did end up loosing out on some of the emotional impact of the story the author was trying to tell.
To sum this review up…
If I had a suggestion for any future reader, pop in a head phone tune in to your favorite indie group just get lost in the tides of the story.