The End:: Five Queer Kids Save the World

by Nora Olsen

When World War Three breaks out, seventeen-year-old Julia is on a school trip to Amsterdam, while fourteen-year-old Marly is trapped in a prison for delinquent girls. They both discover magical amulets, and try their best to save themselves and those around them. But it looks like their best will not be enough, as nuclear war threatens the survival of the human race. On her journey home to New York, Julia is joined by three other queer teens and the mysterious and alluring Ginger; lipstick lesbian Vikki; and five-thousand-year-old Skilly, who has an amulet that grants him eternal life. When Julia and Marly meet, they are immediately attracted to each other. But romance has to take a back seat as the five friends learn the true powers of the amulets. Can they travel through time to save the world from total destruction?

Genres: Young Adult, LGBT, Fantasy, Queer, Fiction, Gender, Young Adult Fantasy

268 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2010

About the author

Nora Olsen's debut novel, The End: Five Queer Kids Save The World, was published by Prizm Books in December 2010. It's the story of five LGBTQ teens who must travel through time to avert a nuclear war. Olsen's second novel, Swans & Klons, was published Bold Strokes Books' Soliloquy imprint in May 2013 and is a dystopian YA novel about two girls who fall in love as they join the struggle to free enslaved clones. Frenemy of the People (2014) is the story of two girls who hate each other... until they fall in love. Maxine Wore Black (2014) is a queer and trans YA homage to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca.

Reviews

[Rachel Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Five queer kids save the world after an apocalypse!

With that premise, I expected to enjoy the book a lot more than I actually did. It’s largely a comedy, with the apocalypse caused by Muldoona, a Goddess lurking in her Fortress of Despair and eating peeled grapes. Humor is the most subjective of forms, and others might well find this book funnier than I did. I mostly found it totally unfunny.

The first chapter introduces Skilly, a bisexual 5000-year-old caveman in a 17-year-old body, due to having been given an Amulet of Immortality by his brother Urf.

It is a rule of fiction that protagonist cavepeople get names that sound like names, and non-protagonists get guttural grunts. See also The Clan of the Cave Bear: Protagonist: Ayla. Leading Man: Jondalar. Supporting Cast: Creb, Brun, Broud. In both books, this is explained within the text: Ayla and Jondalar are Cro-Magnons, who are more verbal, and Skilly was not his birth name. Still, the rule stands. Why don’t cavepeople ever get brief names that don’t sound like manly grunts, like Eee, Bip, or Baa?

I am always complaining that ancient immortals never sound, talk, or act like ancient immortals. But in a comedy, why not mine the fact that a main character is prehistoric for laughs? Though Skilly mentions ancient stuff sometimes, he otherwise seems like a modern 20-something.

The other main characters are Vikky and Ginger, a pair of indistinguishable shallow, snarky teenagers, Julia, a less shallow but still snarky teenager, and Marly, who is trans or genderqueer. Marly’s gender identity is not clear-cut, which I liked. Marly is in a locked-in juvenile facility for skipping school. It was explained that teenagers can be locked up for stuff which is not illegal for adults. This is true, but, as was typical of many plot points, an unlikely motivation or occurrence does not get any more plausible just because it’s given one line of justification. Some of this was clearly meant as a joke, but I generally didn't find it funny. In other cases, even satire needs to make sense on its own terms, and this book often didn't.

The apocalypse consists of magically-induced nuclear catastrophe, which kills hundreds of thousands of people and leads to Ginger and Julia getting stranded, along with other shallow American tourists, inside Anne Frank’s house. This is every bit as embarrassingly anvillicious as it sounds. Meanwhile, Marly is stranded in juvenile detention. The kids’ predicament has some nice narrative tension… until Gods give them all magical amulets that solve everything.

If this had been about straight kids, I would not have made it past chapter one. If I hadn’t been on an airplane, I would have given up right there. However, I made it to the end, and I’m kind of glad I did, because the WTF just kept coming. Starting with Marly, previously the most sympathetic character, in the space of a single conversation, becoming one of the least sympathetic characters I have ever encountered in anything.



So, hundreds of thousands of people have died horribly of radiation poisoning, and a cloud of radiation will shortly kill all the survivors. Julia points out to Marly that they need her help to time-travel and reverse the catastrophe. Marly, who has set up a nice community beneath the looming radiation cloud, refuses to help out on the grounds of “Eh, who cares? We’ll be happy until we all die horribly.”

W. T. F. She does eventually, reluctantly help out, but I was never able to get past that. I was also unable to get past the other characters not having a major issue with that. I think Olsen was trying to do a version of "refusing the call," but when the stakes are "saves the world," you need a better reason to not want to help out than "who cares?"

In the department of “bizarrely unsympathetic decisions made for even weirder reasons,” Ginger betrays them all and helps Muldoona try to wipe out the human race because, in a revelation that comes totally out of the blue, Ginger had a baby who she gave up for adoption and whose existence would be wiped out by time travel because she’d never get pregnant because… “The father was a jerk so I wouldn’t have sex with him again, now that I know what a jerk he was.”

W. T. F. So, her entire motivation – the reason for which she’d kill everyone on Earth – is because of a baby whose existence she could guarantee by simply having sex with a jerk, then saving the world. But no! She’d rather kill everyone on Earth, including her baby!

The magic amulets solve everything when one character realizes that they have unlimited power if they only believe that they have unlimited power.

The entire thing was the result of a lover’s spat between male and female Gods. Thematically, either they should have been queer Gods (like, explicitly bisexual), or it should have been some sort of “straight love doomed the world, queer love will save it.” As it was, it just seemed like totally random straightness in an otherwise queer world.

Marly, now time-traveled into her ten-year-old body, shares a tongue kiss with an also-deaged, now fourteen-year-old Julia. EW.

It concludes with a totally inexplicable epilogue in which Skilly, whom everyone hates because he wouldn’t give up his own immortality to save Ginger (who had a change of heart and was killed in battle), goes to China and looks for opium (W. T. F.) and meets a handsome stranger. Seriously, I have NO idea what point the epilogue was attempting to make.



Not my cup of tea. But it might be yours! I have a low tolerance for hipster irony, and very particular tastes in comedy.

[Nina (Death, Books, and Tea) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review:Skilly is sailing, Ginger and Julia are on a school trip, Marly is in prison and Vikki is out of rehab for bulimia when nuclear war looms. Fate brings them together, these teenagers (aside from Skilly, who’s thousands of years old) who have amulets blessing them with various powers. Romances quickly form, but they have other problems- an ancient goddess is rather upset with her husband and is hellbent on destroying the earth.
It’s really nice seeing books with LGBT characters in which the main focus isn’t their sexuality/gender. We do have another plot, underneath the tangle of romances, of Muldoona plotting her destruction and our heroes trying to stop her. It’s nice also seeing a genderqueer character-the T part of LGBT is hardly ever represented. Marly becoming comfortable with sometimes not feeling like a girl, not always feeling like a boy, and sometimes feeling like “a gender free mutant with magic powers” is a development that you could easily see coming and felt natural.
In terms of sexual orientation and gender, we have a diverse range of characters. But on other counts we have a lot of variation too. Age wise, personality wise, and species wise –we have a random selection of deities from multiple cultures. Vikki I found a little boring, as she seemed a bit stereotypical and she didn’t do that much, but the others were good. Ginger is my favourite, Marly is independent and Skilly is nice in that he’ll try things out for the rest of the team, even if it extends to living out a month again because his time travel theory wasn’t quite right.
That whole time travel thing was a little bit hard to get my head around. Not because it was time travel (I do quite well in understanding it, unless you mess it up like Stephen Moffat does in Doctor Who), but because all characters revert to the bodies that they had. In this case, our five main characters become four years younger. Leaving Marly age ten. It’s hard getting used to a ten year old heroine, when, from many books and this book too, you get used to them being a bit older. Still, ten year old Marly is a good character, even though it does take a little bit of time getting used to them.
This whole timeskip does lead to some rather awkward situations too. We have Ginger lamenting not being able to carry on a relationship with Skilly because she is now in the body of a thirteen year old, while (with his immortality amulet) he is in one of a seventeen (I think) year old. And, before the timeskip, we have a fourteen year old asking an eighteen year old really bluntly “Do you want to have sex now?” I get that they’re in a post apocalyptic environment, but they’ve only known each other two months and I don’t know what fourteen year olds Nora knows but most of us don’t want sex at our age.... I don’t like young (under sixteens) people in sexual situations. That’s something that bugs me. Aside from that, the romance is good and built up nicely.


Overall: Strength 3 tea to a LGBT novel with a lot of action, romance, and cuteness.

[Samantha Boyette · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of those books that once I started it I could barely put it down. I was immediately pulled into the story and concerned for all the characters. I'm not sure what it was that made me like all of them so quickly, but I did.

The beginning nicely sets up a world at the very end of its rope. Nuclear war has begun at the urging of an irate god. Now, this whole bit of the plot is a little weak, but I'll ignore it because I loved the rest so much.

What about the rest did I love? The relationships between the kids were great. Their friendships were realistic and those that grew into romance did so pretty naturally. It was fun to read a book where all the main characters were queer, but it was just a smidgen unbelievable. Still, each kid's story was believable.

This book was flat out fun from start to finish, its flaws small and easily overlooked. Give it a read!

[Erin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I graciously won a free copy from first reads giveaway!

This book is about a handful of adolescents who have to save the world from an evil god.

This was a very easy read and finished the book within a couple of days. I would say that I think this book is for teen readers.

Overall this book was good. I didn't like how the author wrapped up the book, but that's just because I like things nice and neat with a pretty bow on at the end.

Would recommend to youth or anyone looking for an easy summer read.

[Jazmin Rivas · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was such a fantastic book. It was totally fun to read about queer kids. I could barely put it down! It starts out interesting with a Nuclear war. But a little bit of the plot was weak, but i still loved it. The most I loved was that the kid's friendship was so realistic. Each of the queer kid's story was so fantastic! I would highly recommend this book.

[Jasper Mancebo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. A book with 5 lgbt main characters, and it was dystopian/fantasy/sci-fi to boot? It was like a dream come true. However, I could not get through it. The books writing style was not for me, and the way it handled some subjects was a little heavy handed. That being said, I'm still glad this book was written, because the basic idea behind it was wonderful.

[Lili Kathey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Was this bad or was this bad? Answer: this was real fucking bad. I don't even think I can explain why, except that no character was credible and/or relatable and the plotline (and how unrealistically people reacted) was ew.

[Shante · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Read for your future! · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read Ethans review at:
http://readforyourfuture.blogspot.com...

[Emmie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it. It was weird and the ending was rushed. I could have done with another 100 pages after they went back. But overall it was nice reading a book with queer heroes.

[Leisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creative and fun. A fast read for a rain evening.