I had never heard of this book before I saw it on Emma's page, but I thought I would really enjoy it after I read the synopsis. I'm warning you now though, this review is super heavy on the spoilers, so stop reading here and skip to the end if you want to go in to it unaware! I mean it! I'm going to give away most of the book!
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Warning: There are spoilers for the book contained in this review.
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This book, to me, had a lot of potential. Daisy was a dynamic, fun character to read. For a book that started off with a mystery, she was a good choice as narrator because she was freaked out enough to be believable but she was determined enough to keep investigating. The idea of her friendship with Henry was really interesting too, mostly because we initially only see it through her eyes.
Henry himself started out as an interesting character too. We hear enough about him from Daisy and the other characters to really feel like you know him, but he's ultimately missing, and so his true characters isn't really revealed until Daisy finds him. That's when we find out that everything we thought we knew about him, everything Daisy thought she knew, wasn't right. And that is exactly when this story went bad.
If the author had stuck to the synopsis, I think this book would have been amazing. Instead, everything the synopsis hints at plays out in the first couple of chapters. After that, the story devolves into a weird semi-but-not-apocalyptic comedy routine. We find out that Henry's family are preppers and that he has definitely drunk the cool-aid. The family is living on a compound with several other families (including one that is the stuff of kidnapping nightmares). The author sets it up as them being not-quite-right-in-the-head. Then we find out that, surprise, Henry and his parents are right and there is a massive plague that is killing everyone off. Not only that, but as suddenly as everything starts, it ends just as suddenly.
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End Spoilers
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Overall, I did not like this book. The cover is gorgeous and the synopsis is intriguing. Actually, it had a lot of potential, but the author took the story in a weird direction that I just couldn't get in to. My biggest problem with it was that the synopsis was misleading; it really only covered the events of the first couple of chapters. Therefore, I had to give The Last Place on Earth 2 out of 5 stars.
