End of the World House by Adrienne Celt #bookreview #fantasy #scifi #dystopian

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Title: End of the World House

Author: Adrienne Celt

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Publication Date: April 19, 2022

Page Count: 316

My rating: 2 1/2 stars

About the book:

Groundhog Day meets Ling Ma’s Severance in End of the World House, a thought-provoking comedic novel about two young women trying to save their friendship as the world collapses around them.

Bertie and Kate have been best friends since high school. Bertie is a semi-failed cartoonist, working for a prominent Silicon Valley tech firm. Her job depresses her, but not as much as the fact that Kate has recently decided to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

When Bertie’s attempts to make Kate stay fail, she suggests the next-best thing: a trip to Paris that will hopefully distract the duo from their upcoming separation. The vacation is also a sort of last hurrah, coming during a ceasefire in a series of escalating world conflicts.

One night in Paris, they meet a strange man in a bar who offers them a private tour of the Louvre. The women find themselves alone in the museum, where nothing is quite as it seems. Caught up in a day that keeps repeating itself, Bertie and Kate are eventually separated, and Bertie is faced with a mystery that threatens to derail everything. In order to make her way back to Kate, Bertie has to figure out how much control she has over her future—and her past—and how to survive an apocalypse when the world keeps refusing to end.

End of the World House by Adrienne Celt is a dystopian science fiction fantasy novel set in a future version of our world. The world has been at war with fires and floods and bombings in the cities and of course shortages in the supplies.

Bertie and Kate have been best friends since high school and have gotten one another through this tough time but Kate has decided to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Bertie doesn’t want to see Kate go but Kate had made up her mind to leave the city.

Bertie decides that a girl’s trip is just what the pair need to take their minds off of the separation and there is currently a ceasefire going on in the world making it safer to travel. Bertie and Kate head to Paris but after arriving they meet a strange man and end up trapped in a time loop in the Louvre.

I’m one that is always up for a good science fiction or dystopian read so when I saw End of the World House by Adrienne Celt and noticed it was compared to Groundhog Day, which I enjoyed, I couldn’t help but be curious. Well, this one did not pull me in the way I completely expected it to. One wouldn’t think that maybe it was the repetitive nature that did me in but no, it just simply fell flat and I couldn’t not connect to the characters at all. Also sold as a humorous read I didn’t find that at all for me either so in the end I gave this one two and a half stars as it certainly had potential but could have been better executed in my opinion.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

Find this book online:

Goodreads  /  Amazon

About the author:

Adrienne Celt is originally from Seattle, but now lives in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of two previous novels: Invitation to a Bonfire, currently being adapted for TV by AMC, and The Daughters, which won the 2015 PEN Southwest Book Award for Fiction and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR. Adrienne is also a cartoonist, and she publishes a weekly webcomic at LoveAmongtheLampreys.com.