This was a 3.5 star read for me. Entertaining concept and I really liked parts of it.
Long- married couple Jane and Dan go to an ultra exclusive restaurant for their anniversary. Whilst they’re there, climate activists storm the building and take everyone hostage. The added twist is that Jane wrote a book with almost exactly this storyline- and she knows how the story ends.
There are some fun scenes and entertaining plot lines as well as some deeper societal messages

I firmly believe that you could cut 50-100 pages of this book and make absolutely no difference to the conclusion or execution of the novel itself. The plot and the writing did not justify the 368 pages this is being published in.

'Jane and Dan At The End of The World' is a novel about a group of diners at an exclusive Californian restaurant being taken hostage by an environmental activist group. We move between perspectives - mainly Jane and Dan, but occasionally other characters and more consistently, a responding cop called Kip. A book that handles a hostage situation gone wrong really well, I felt, is Fredrik Backman's 'Anxious People', largely because it managed to maintain momentum for the majority of the novel. This one, unfortunately, doesn't. The author has a bad habit of tumbling into contextual tangents every time someone says or does something, which I immensely disliked reading. There's no better way to pour cold water onto tension than to stop and say 'she flashed back to a fight with her daughter' which had very little to do with what just happened. There were points when I found myself skimming those sections just to get back to the actual scene that was happening on the page.

I started to get irritated by Jane and Dan about 3/4 of the way in - it felt like the author kept stalling for time, hoping it would a red herring or another moment of tension when it was just dull. The characters made odd, unmotivated decisions - why WOULDN'T you run from a building in danger so you could have a conversation about your marriage? - and the wait between certain people showing up and certain things happening were dragged on for far far too long.

I finished the book, which means I enjoyed it to a degree, but I can't help but feel another author would have tackled this concept far better. I'm frustrated by the problems more than I can celebrate the positives, mainly because I'm struggling to think of any. The idea is sound, the execution is poor.

An interesting story which grabs your attention from the start. I enjoyed the parallels between Jane's novel and the story playing out in front of Jane and Dan. This book kept me guessing, I didn't know where it was going and the twists were well done.

Such a great read! It focuses on marriage, commitment, and important issues such as the climate. It is different from your tropical read but that what hooks the reader. You won’t be disappointed picking this one up