THE WORLD ENDS IN APRIL

It’s so annoying that Elle’s survivalist grandfather makes her do all these prepper drills—until she learns about the asteroid headed for Earth.

Elle’s widowed father loves his dad but can’t stand the way Grandpa Joe pulls Elle and her kid brothers into all his survivalist planning. Elle barely tolerates the surprise drills, the inspections of her bug-out bag, the insistence that she eat disgusting MREs. But one day, she comes upon a scary website in which a Harvard astrophysicist explains that an asteroid is going to hit the planet in the spring. Maybe all of Grandpa Joe’s training will come in handy after all! She enlists the help of her best (and only) friend, but Mack is the opposite of loner Elle, and he brings other students into their survival planning. With Mack, Elle finds herself leading the Hamilton Middle School Nature Club, teaching a few of her fellow students about water filters and heirloom seeds. But while Elle wants Mack laser-focused on the apocalypse and on her, he’s distracted by the swim team—and worse, by his possible transfer to the Conrad School for the Blind. Mack is both kind and adventurous, but it’s unfortunate the didactic descriptions of his assistive tools lack accuracy in this context. Elle and her family are white, Mack’s black, and their classmates are racially diverse. Watching these kids spiral into paranoia, fueled by a fraudulent internet tale of conspiracies, makes for compelling reading.

A page-turner.