IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD AND I'M IN MY BATHING SUIT

Epic end-of-summer plans go awry for five kids in Ohio.

Twelve-year-old Eddie Gordon Holloway is ready to have a blast at Beach Bash with his friends—it’s the day when everyone in town heads to Lake Erie for great food and live music. However, when his mom unearths the mountain of smelly laundry that he’s ignored for the entire summer, Eddie is left home in a literal funk, with nothing to wear but his glow-in-the-dark pineapple swim trunks. After a power outage, Eddie links up with four other left-behind kids, and they all enjoy fun times until the streetlights come on—but none of their families return from the party. The kids take action to prepare for whatever is happening in their new world without parents, gathering necessities from their neighbors’ empty houses and trying to keep each other’s spirits up with dad jokes and teasing, except in the truly gentle spaces where they admit their fears to each other. Ultimately, the buildup to the to-be-continued ending doesn’t quite deliver. Long-winded digressions interrupt the flow of the storytelling, and it takes almost half the book to get to the zany situations that provide most of the laughs. Matter-of-fact scenes with Eddie taking his ADHD medicine and talking through school and home pressures with Trey, their school’s all-star athlete, offer insightful representations of Black boys bonding on different emotional levels. All main characters read as Black.

An unevenly paced celebration of wacky summer adventures.