Apr 10

Apr 10 End of the World House

Author: Adrienne Celt
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Groundhog Day meets Ling Ma’s Severance in End of the World House, a thought-provoking comedic novel about two young women trying to save their friendship as the world collapses around them.

Bertie and Kate have been best friends since high school. Bertie is a semi-failed cartoonist, working for a prominent Silicon Valley tech firm. Her job depresses her, but not as much as the fact that Kate has recently decided to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

When Bertie’s attempts to make Kate stay fail, she suggests the next-best thing: a trip to Paris that will hopefully distract the duo from their upcoming separation. The vacation is also a sort of last hurrah, coming during a ceasefire in a series of escalating world conflicts.

One night in Paris, they meet a strange man in a bar who offers them a private tour of the Louvre. The women find themselves alone in the museum, where nothing is quite as it seems. Caught up in a day that keeps repeating itself, Bertie and Kate are eventually separated, and Bertie is faced with a mystery that threatens to derail everything. In order to make her way back to Kate, Bertie has to figure out how much control she has over her future—and her past—and how to survive an apocalypse when the world keeps refusing to end.

TL;DR Review

End of the World House is a trippy literary page-turner with a great premise and an ending I’ll be thinking about for a long time. It manages to be very readable and also very smart.

For you if: You like novels that border commercial and literary fiction with a weird, speculative premise.

Full Review

Thank you, Simon & Schuster, for the review copy of this book! As soon as I saw the synopsis, I knew I had to read it — and it did not disappoint.

End of the World House is about a young woman named Bertie who is a cartoonist at a tech startup in a near-future, apocalyptic, WWIII-type world. She and her soon-to-move-away best friend, Kate, decide to go on a vacation to Paris while the world is at (what could be its last) ceasefire. A man they met in a bar gets them into the Louvre while its closed But in the midst of their exploration, Bertie finds herself not only separated from Kate, but also in a Groundhog-Day-esque time loop.

I don’t want to spoil anything, but one of the best parts of this book is that it goes in a totally different direction than you probably expect based on the synopsis. I was totally hooked and finished the book in one sitting — it’s not a thriller or anything, but it’s definitely got a good pace to it.

This book is readable and also smart, a great fit for people who like to land in that sweet spot between a contemporary and literary type of feeling. The apocalyptic state of the world feels eerily possible and only a few steps up from how things are today, which makes for resonant ideas to ruminate on — that we are all wildly imperfect in relationship to one another, and all just doing our best; the way we cling to those imperfect relationships when things are scary and we are lonely; the feeling of futility around going to work and leading normal lives as society crumbles around us; the question of whether it’s worth following our dreams as the world burns.

I can’t wait for more people to read this so I can talk to them about it!