WE ALL LOOKED UP
Tommy Wallach
Simon & Schuster, March 2015, RRP $14.95
What happens when you take an over-achiever, a jock, some stoners, and girl with a ‘reputation’, and then throw in an asteroid that will probably end life as we know it? The answer is We All Looked Up, the debut novel from Brooklyn-based writer and musician Tommy Wallach.
In a time when the Young Adult dystopian novel seem to have taken over the world, it is refreshing to read a story that has the human reaction to the threat as the main focus, rather than the threat itself. There is no great autocratic conspiracy, no government-sanctioned virus that has escaped from a secret lab, just a high probability that the asteroid that is heading close to Earth may be on a collision course. This possible impending cataclysm is used a vehicle to explore how we would react if we knew we only had a few months to live, not only on an individual level but as a society as a whole. Continue reading