Happy Doomsday Slow Boils to a Sloppy Ending

Happy Doomsday by David Sosnowski
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This continues my streak of not really loving any books put out by Amazon's publishing imprints. I probably got this from Prime First reading and took a while to actually get to it.

The gist is this is another postapocalyptic end of the world YA book. But it's not zombies or nuclear war or disease. Basically one day everyone just keels over except three teens who were contemplating suicide: Dev, a boy with Asperger's in Dearborn, MI; Lucy, a pregnant Goth girl in Atlanta, GA; and Marcus (formerly Mo as in Mohammad) an Arab American quarterback in Oklahoma.

While the beginning of the book tells us they all meet, it's not until 80% in that all three get together for real. Until then Lucy and Marcus search for survivors and find each other while Dev turns his home into a fortress to keep out rats, dogs, cats, pigs, and whatever else. This major section drags on a little long. It felt like watching The Last Man on Earth--an early adaptation of I Am Legend--with Vincent Price as the titular last man on Earth. A lot of the movie was just him puttering around, disposing of bodies and finding garlic and getting a new car and stuff like that that isn't all that fun or exciting. In the same way most of this book is just them puttering around doing that kind of stuff and evading swarms of rats, pigs, bugs, and whatever.

This was tolerable if not really exciting. But after they all meet like in the beginning is where it all falls down. One main character is killed with less fanfare than a dog--literally. Though another character essentially murdered him, this isn't really dealt with. The last 5 percent then goes into fast-forward mode until it just kind of ends. It probably could have ended a while earlier.

It was disappointing that it just ended the way it did. I was hoping for more. So it goes.

View all my reviews

(Fun Facts:  I live only like 25 miles or so from where Dev would be living in Dearborn.  You might not think about it, but wild pigs have become a huge problem in the South, California, and in Europe.  The problem is they're big, mean, and tear up just about anything in their path.  Without a lot of natural predators they can do a lot of damage.  So the idea that with humans gone you have swarms of wild pigs running around unchecked is actually pretty true.)