We All Looked Up

by Tommy Wallach
Hennepin County Library hardcover 370 pages
genre: YA realistic fiction, coming-of-age
(Spoiler alert! Ending of book info at the bottom!)

This one is definitely more for a high school reader than my middle schoolers. An asteroid is heading for Earth, with a 66.6% chance of it hitting and ending all life. Things that used to have great meaning suddenly don't. Lots and lots of alcohol, sex, and strong language.

Peter - handsome kind athlete, trying to decide what really matters
Stacy - his superficial girlfriend
Andy - slacker who just wants to get laid before he dies
Bobo - Andy's best friend and drug dealer - seriously messed up
Misery / Samantha - Peter's sister, Bobo's girlfriend - so incredibly lost




Anita - smart girl who has always done what she is supposed to do, but really wants to be a singer


There were other characters, but these are the main ones. The story is told third-person, but from their perspectives.

Liked: the growth and interaction of these characters, the realness of their struggles
Disliked: the darkness of so much of the conversation and behavior

page 27 - What a horrible library! Sounds like it's stuck in the 50s . . . "no one other than the librarians, toddling about behind the desk and in the circulation room, begrudgingly lending out their precious books. They seemed to see students primarily as things to be shushed." Okay, I know this is irrelevant to the overall story, but it's a sensitive spot to me.

page 172 - When Anita and her mom are fighting about the Bible and what is going on. It saddens me when people use the Word as a way to prove their point or to control others, rather than as instruction. Her parents don't demonstrate Jesus' love at all.

page 335 - When Anita, Eliza, and Misery are talking in the hotel room. "And there in the darkness of the hotel room, scarcely more than twenty-four hours before the maybe end of the world, the three of them managed to laugh together. It turned out that no amount of terror could stop the great human need to connect. . . . Real winning was having the most to lose, even if it meant you might lose it all." I love this scene because it gets at the heart of what really does matter most in life. There are a lot of great conversations between the characters in this book.

page 346 - Peter and Eliza in the car after the big scene at the apartment . . . Eliza telling her made-up story about the world and second chances and mercy . . . poignant scene, especially considering what follows.

Spoiler: I love that the author ended the story without saying whether the asteroid does hit or passes by. A lot of the tension in the book was the "what if" factor - what if the asteroid doesn't hit and life goes on? What if we will all die in X days? I don't skip ahead to the end, so that tension was present to the very end of the book. Excellent!