Oh, TJ Klune. I drank up your Cerulean Sea, and then the Extraordinaires was indeed extraordinary, and then there were some follow ups that I felt were a bit on the nose (like, SMASHED nose on the nose) so I distanced myself a bit and kept you in the background. I think it’s probably going to be the same here, but I enjoyed the commitment to the bit!
The bit here is that there is a black hole en route to the Earth (this is a real thing! black holes can move relative to other things through space, very quickly, and since they are by their very nature quite hard to detect, one could come upon us much too late for us to do anything about it) (not that anything can be done about a black hole, they are terrifying, Interstellar is actually a horror film) and Earth is therefore weeks away from being spaghettified away into nothingness. Our main couple, Don and Rodney, have been together for many years (40!) but are picking now, as everything is falling apart and lots of services have stopped working, to complete one final road trip to complete one final task.
It’s a pretty common trope, of course, and you’re probably going to guess said trip has something to do with their adopted son Jeremy who we hear about only in flashbacks. Despite their best attempts at providing a loving and stable environment for Jeremy, he remains a fundamentally unhappy kid (Klune confirms in the author’s note, and perhaps in the book as well, that Jeremy is based off of a friend’s child who has oppositional defiant disorder). As they make their way through empty roads and unkempt trails towards their final destination, they ruminate on what went wrong with their small family, but also on what went right.
I suppose at the end of the day ymmv with this book. I found it less heart wrenching than some, I suppose, because I did feel like they made the right decisions in a very difficult position. But then again, I am not a parent (and for some reason all the books I’ve been reading have been about these sorts of challenges) and don’t understand the trauma of ‘giving up’ so to speak, and accepting that your child is a wholly different person who can make their own choices.
