I really really wanted to love this - the premise was right up my alley and I love family-oriented books. However, this wasn't really that much about family. Lenny, the narrator, was weirdly obsessed with her dad's doctor and just fantasised about him despite her dad being really ill. She had better things to do. Also, the writing seemed odd... quite a few times, I'd be reading and wonder why I was being told such seemingly irrelevant details. I'm very much a believer of only writing what is needed and literally none of this was needed. I just couldn't care when I was being told such detail about stuff that didn't matter (about 3 pages were dedicated to writing about her friend [Jonah? Jacob? James? Can't remember] and, like, their entire past as friends. I did not care).

A unique story with an interesting premise. Whilst some of the characters are hit or miss, the ones you do attach yourself to help propel you through the story.

I was unfortunately unable to access this title on my kindle in order to leave review.

Lenny is preparing for the apocalypse. Every night, she researches vacuum decay, designer pathogens, that inexplicable sleeping sickness knocking people out in Kazakhstan.

Not many sixteen-year-olds are this consumed with the end of the world. But Lenny needs to have some sense of control. Her dad is dying of cancer. Her best friend Julian is graduating early and moving three states away. She's having to rehearse for a toe-curling interpretive dance show at school, and deal with her mum's indefatigable jolliness and smoothie-making in the face of the disaster they are confronting.

Unable to review - title archived

The topic of this book is heartbreaking but it is a fresh addition to the YA world. There are more and more titles out there that reflect the reality of being a teenager – family problems, mental health issues... – and I loved that this book was one of them. We need more like this out there!

The difficulty of coping with illness is present in our lives every day and I think Abby Sher has created a wonderful title that will help teenagers (and adults!) alike.

This was a good story with a lot of humour. Even in Lenny's obsessive research into the different ways that the world could end, as frightening as they were, there were jokes and comments and things that made them so obviously written by Lenny. It was a nice way to start each chapter and it was interesting to see how they changed with what happened throughout the book.

All the characters were really strong too. Even though it might seem a little over the top sometimes, especially with the dance teacher, I like having that sort of thing, a character with a real sense of personality that adds to the humour. It makes for a lot of interesting ways in which they react to things and fleshes out the book so it doesn't seem to be just one or two characters who're holding everything up.

This is a really serious subject, so I was really glad to see how they kept the humour up throughout the book, even when it could have gone really serious and depressing, there was a morbid joke or something to keep the mood up, even though it shouldn't be appropriate.

This was definitely a really good book to read and I loved Lenny so much. It would be cool to have sequel though I don't know what it would be about.

I initially could not decide whether or not I liked it - it warmed on me gradually and I have just sat for an hour to finish it! Lenny is trying to cope with her dad's diagnosis of terminal cancer by obsessing with how the world could end. She has to learn to accept the situation and enjoy what is here now. I struggled with the character of her mother but loved her older sister and Julian - her gay friend. Both proved to be anchors for her. Her suffering and self harming almost seemed to go unnoticed - both were dealt with sympathetically.

Not an easy read but worth persevering with.

Growing up and being a teen is hard enough as it is for awkward Lenny but throw in a dad with cancer and it's a whole other ball game, involving good-looking doctors, best friends about to move to the other side of the country, a crazy busy mum and a sprinkle of OCD and end of the world anxiety. A moving and sometimes twisted story.

The story follows Lenny and her life dealing with her dying father and her obsession with all the ways in which the world could end.

So this was a bit of tough read for me. My mother died of cancer and it brought up a lot of emotions watching through Lenny’s eyes as her dad is dying. I have to give the author credit for handling such a harrowing subject with great care and understanding.

But the actual story was a bit boring in my honest opinion. There were so many tired old tropes in this book. I’ll list a few below:

The sick girl. Yes, she was mentally ill, (OCD and anxiety) but in my eyes this still counts as the same thing.

The gay best friend who’s male. (This is not confined to YA, this is just a general one.)

She has no other friends. Well, it does mention another girl who she use to be friends with but that’s it.

The inappropriate crush. She develops a crush on Dr Ganesh, her father’s doctor, who thirty six and she’s only sixteen.

So overall not my cup of tea, but I found the different ways the world could end, like vacuum decay or nanotechnology, absolutely terrifying. Also the ending was full of hope and optimism for the future which I found touching.

I loved everything about this book! Amazing characters and a wonderful funny plot! I laughed allot!

This is a very brief review from Goodreads as I haven't been able to write a full review for my blog. I may do so in the future; if so, I'll update this page.

Reading this book was a deeply stressful experience, mostly because I suffer from an overwhelming terror of mortality and the inevitable fact that people I care about will one day die keeps me up at night on a regular basis. And thinking of all the ways in which things could go catastrophically wrong and kill us all didn't help either, though I guess I should've seen that coming.

I liked the end of the book better than some of the earlier parts, but Lenny's crush on her dad's doctor made me really uncomfortable and I felt like the book didn't really address the fact he was about twenty years older than her ENOUGH, you know? Also she said she was nine years old in 2010 which made me realise that I'M OLD and that's not helping with the mortality thing.

I don't know. I'm stressed now. I don't think I could honestly say I enjoyed this because mostly it just put me on edge.

I always love reading novels that centre around family dynamics and it's actually one of the types of books that I look for the most. Gone are the days where I want to read about unrequited love all of the time; I want to read about families and the troubles or happiness that they go through. All the Ways the World Can End is one of those books.

Lenny (short for Eleanor) feels like the world is about to end. Her best friend is moving to New York City to attend Julliard and her dad has terminal cancer. To cope with her stress Lenny is making a list of all the ways the world can end—designer pathogens, blood moon prophecies, alien invasion—and stockpiling supplies in a bunker in the backyard. Then she starts to develop feelings for her dad's very nice young doctor—and she thinks he may have feelings for her too. Spoiler alert: he doesn't. But a more age-appropriate love interest might. In a time of complete uncertainty, one thing's for sure: Lenny's about to see how everything is ending and beginning. All at the same time.

The best thing about this book was the last 10/20 pages because that's where the raw emotion was and I feel like that's where the writing was at it's best. The rest of the book just didn't really do it for me.

I thought that the characters fell flat, the plot just wasn't that prominent throughout the entire book which was a massive shame. The book centres around Lenny dealing with her father's cancer but most of the book was just her pining after her dad's doctor which I didn't find funny or a good plot point at all.





"I'm too hurt to hurt more."

- Abby Sher, All the Ways the World Can End






Another thing is that I had no motivation to read it. Normally, I can read a contemporary in a few hours (even if it's a 3-star book). But with this one, it took me a handful of DAYS, which is another way I know that I didn't enjoy reading it. Reading a book shouldn't feel like a chore, but reading this really did feel like it. I actually wanted to DNF it at about 25% but decided against it and I thought I would see what the rest of the book is like. I'm glad I've finished it, but part of me thinks that I could have read a book that I know I would love during that time. Oh well... At least I can say that I've read it.

I know this seems like a very ranty review and very negative, but I genuinely can't think of a positive thing. There's actually one more thing that really annoyed me about this book. Lenny has a gay best friend. Who is sidelined. No. Sorry but I am SICK of the gay best friend trope who is just there so the author can say 'I'VE INCLUDED A DIVERSE CHARACTER'. No honey, you just placed him in the book. He's hardly in it because he is pushed to the side whilst the main character chases after her stupid romantic fantasy about her dad's doctor. UGH.

Have you read it? What did you think because I'm honestly interested if I'm the only one who thinks this about the book?

Disclaimer: this book was sent to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Released 27th July

All The Ways The World Can End was a massive disappointment. I read it on my kindle and I tried to make it to at least 50% of the way through but I ended up giving up on it at around 20% of the way through.
The characters were self-obsessed and selfish and had no special characteristics to entice the reader into their story. The protagonist, Lenny, was very annoying and chaotic. I couldn’t bring myself to engage with her self-obsessed drivel.
My other issue is that Lenny has had her obsession with the world ending since the age of seven and clearly doesn’t make any attempts to hide it but nobody has made any attempt to help her or even shows any form of concern for her behaviour.
Her sister Emma and their mother were just utterly self-absorbed and generally awful people. Her sister is too busy partying to be worried about the fact that her dad has cancer and their mother seems more pre-occupied with her job.
It just wasn’t what I expected from it at all. I thought it sounded like the kind of book I would love.
The book has a promising start. It begins with a list of “All The Ways The World Can End” and “Not As Deadly, But Definitely Make It Suck To Be Alive.”
“My dad had turned into a nocturnal creature. Some rare half-owl, half-lemur, with a majestic wingspan but blood shot eyes, shredding grey wisps of himself everywhere.
‘Fancy meeting you here,’ he said when I walked into my parents’ bedroom with his morning coffee. No matter how many hours he’d been up starring at the shadowy walls, Dad never let on how lonely or exhausted he felt. Only his slow red-rimmed blinks gave him away.”
Her mum has all sorts of random theories on how to cure he dads cancer. Clearly it is just her way of coping with it.
“Going raw was mom’s newest theory about how to cure cancer and save the world. Before that it was eating cloves of garlic and trashing our microwave. Before that it was getting rid of all wheat, meat, corn, sugar, and laundry detergents in our house. At one point we boiled all our water and turned off all our electronics (that lasted exactly three hours.)"
Passages like this gave me a ray of hope that actually this book could turn out to be ok but sadly I was mistaken. The premise of the book was good but the reality sadly failed to live up to it.

I recieved a copy of this book from netgalley in exchange for an honest review. The story follows Lenny and the many ways she tries to cope with her fathers terminal cancer. In the beginning, the book didn't grab me but I stuck with it and I was so glad I did. The book doesn't skirt around the subject, showing exactly what happened, slowly building to acceptance from Lenny. I really enjoyed the book the more I got into it, getting invested in the characters.
4/5 stars.

This book just wasn't for me unfortunately. It wasn't poorly written and in places it did made me smirk, but it was slow and no character was particularly interesting or caught my attention enough to keep me reading. The over the top feminist dance teacher Marty I thought was far too over done. She didn't need to be that far-fetched to get the same point across.
I made it to 25%, but counted finish.

This book is an emotional, erratic (and slightly reminiscent of Bridget Jones if she was young and had a poorly dad) rollercoaster. Eleanor, or Lenny to you and me, is going through a lot right now. Her dad has rectal cancer, his doctor is super cute and she's SURE he fancies her (he so doesn't but she royally embarrasses herself regardless as all of us have done in our time! Bad memories!) and her best friend is leaving town. So how does she cope? She doesn't really. She makes a bit of a mess, along a slightly destructive path, and all whilst making lots of lists. Even before all of this Lenny was a list maker, but now her lists of how stuff in the World might someday be the cause of our eventual doom have become a coping mechanism for her.

This might be an incredibly sad topic (expect plenty of tear jerker moments), but this is actually a pretty humorous book. Lenny is so funny, very silly and does a lot of things I think we've all done and regretted years later! It almost feels like a nostalgic read to be honest. It is sometimes quite a rushed narrative, and by this I mean that Lenny almost has a super fast, rushed pace of narrating, but it makes her all the more likeable. It can be a little confusing at times, but it's worth it.

On a more sensitive note, this book deals very compassionately with cancer, and how people manage together to deal with such an overwhelming diagnosis. This will be close to home for many readers, but the author certainly nails what it feels like to be utterly helpless but entirely determined to find some way, any way, to help your loved one. I can't explain how perfectly they capture, through Lenny, how someone might feel during those moments.

A likeable character, a painfully honest representation of what it feels to swim against the tide when faced with the imminent death of someone you love, but also an overwhelmingly heart warming and positive message at the end. Lenny is a goofball, but she's a goofball in a position nobody would wish upon anyone, and her story is worth a read.