Sarah Vincent//Blog Writer
Every artist has their own way of displaying hard concepts so that they are accessible to a wide variety of audiences. For those who don’t experience traumatic events personally, there is almost always some form of art that portrays their darkest fears. In Marieke Nijkamp’s debut novel, This is Where it Ends, the reader follows four storylines during a school shooting. It is done in the perspective of four individual students who have some connection to the school shooter himself, which engages the plot and helps the reader have a better understanding of the events as they unfold.
This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp
With all that is happening in America, sometimes it is hard to grasp onto the horror and fear that children are living through. Each day students leave the safety of their home, worrying if their school will be next. No one believes it could happen to themーuntil it does. This is Where it Ends highlights the anxiety, fear, unpredictableness and intensity from a fictional school, with fictional students, yet the events described are far from fictional.
Readers are bound to pick up this book and have trouble putting it down. When I read it my first time, it only took me three days, and that was with other distractions taking up some of my time. The book jumps into the action almost immediately, and from that first page, it is non-stop action. The reader will feel a heavy ball forming in the pit of their stomachs, as this book hits really, really close to home. Every day that there is a new school shooting, we see the aftermath. We see, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” We see tweets and posts on social media about the atrocity that is this mass form of killing. We see all about the school shooting, but we don’t see the school shooting.
In one of the most recent school shootings, in Parkland, Florida, we actually saw some videos from the inside of the school, as this shooting was going on, which should have been more unsettling to viewers than it was. I believe that society loves when bad things happen, as long as they see it happening. If it’s not seen by all, it can’t be completely understood, and it can’t be as surreal as it should be.
What you don’t see in the news is people being shot and killed. You don’t see people running and hiding for their own survival, or the panic that sets in when parents get that dreaded text from their children, saying that if they don’t see them again, just to know that they loved the life they had. With Nijkamp’s This is Where it Ends, you are put right in the middle of most people’s biggest fear, four times. You experience is four different times, and the emotions are completely different but the reasons for reading these four perspectives is to help people get a better understanding of why this needs to stop. If you want to be put into a high-anxiety scenario, without actually putting your own life at risk, reading this book would help you succeed in feeling as if you’ve undergone a major trauma. You will cry, your stomach will be in your throat, and you will be very angry.
Good.