We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach

We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Originality: ♥♥♥♥

Quality of writing: ♥♥♥♥♥

Setting: ♥♥♥♥

Characters: ♥♥♥♥♥

Overall View: ♥♥♥♥♥

Breathless, saddened, and a little awed, this book has exceeded my expectations from the moment I started reading it. From the very beginning to it's very last words, We All Looked Up has been a lyrical and thought-provoking piece of fiction, one that will continue to stay with me for a while.

Bought as a gift to myself after handing in my dissertation, I am still processing how one can write so beautifully about death, about love, about sex and desire to give all these abstract visions a whole new motion and meaning. The novel follows four teenagers struggling to live out what they think will be their last two months on earth to reach a goal, to find their feet and understand everything they never could understand before.

The novel focuses on how labels once affected their lives (the athlete, the outcast, the slacker, the over-achiever), and how once after Ardor the asteroid appeared in the sky ready to threaten their earth they are mashed together to come to a realisation that labels have no meaning at all.

The whole book is all verging on the discussion of humanity, of sanity, and of togetherness. As people, we will be people, and it is books and narratives with an edge like this that can provide a scope onto which we as readers can latch onto. This way, we are given a chance to think and imagine our own apocalypse, and decide what it is that will make us reveal our true inner-selves. Because that is what the characters in this book do - they unfurl from their thickened skins to show a deep individuality. Labels do not matter. We are who we are.

The plot of the novel is electrifying. We move with the characters from one place to another, from one emotion to the other. This is a book worth while reading, I certainly guarantee you that.