Blog Tour + End of World Bucket List + Giveaway: We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach

Title: We All Looked Up
Author: Tommy Wallach
Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary
Source: Simon & Schuster Australia
Goodreads

Four high school seniors put their hopes, hearts, and humanity on the line as an asteroid hurtles toward Earth in this contemporary novel.

They always say that high school is the best time of your life.

Peter, the star basketball player at his school, is worried “they” might actually be right. Meanwhile Eliza can’t wait to escape Seattle—and her reputation—and perfect-on-paper Anita wonders if admission to Princeton is worth the price of abandoning her real dreams. Andy, for his part, doesn’t understand all the fuss about college and career—the future can wait.

Or can it? Because it turns out the future is hurtling through space with the potential to wipe out life on Earth. As these four seniors—along with the rest of the planet—wait to see what damage an asteroid will cause, they must abandon all thoughts of the future and decide how they’re going to spend what remains of the present.

Review by Nara

So if there was an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, about to wipe out all of humanity...obviously there are some things I'd like to do.

1. Badger Brandon Sanderson to release all of his upcoming releases, unfinished works, drafts, (basically anything he's been working on) early. And then spend as much time as possible while not doing the other items on the list finishing off those books.

2. Try a snow egg. This is one of the signature dishes of a pretty famous restaurant in Sydney, and MY GOD IT LOOKS SO DELICIOUS. Definitely want to try one before the world is destroyed. That's assuming the restaurant continues to open...

3. Visit Japan. Japan is somewhere I've always wanted to go, especially because I'm such a fan of manga and anime. And I love Japanese food. Actually I'm probably going at the end of this year, so hopefully an asteroid doesn't suddenly appear any time soon...

4. Watch How to Train Your Dragon one last time. Because why the heck not.

5. All of the sappy stuff with family and friends! I'm pretty sure this would be on everyone's bucket lists, because of course you'd like to spend time with your loved ones.

Well, that was one unexpectedly fabulous book. To be honest, I wasn't sure that I'd enjoy this book to such a large degree only because I was skeptical about the whole "end of the world" scenario in a contemporary novel. I've read a couple of other books with similar concepts, and none of them turned out to be quite what I wanted. However, I can definitely say that We All Looked Up was different. It was so raw and so realistic. The characters were interesting and relateable. In fact, basically everything about the book was awesome.

With four POV characters in a standalone contemporary novel, I was initially concerned about how well we'd be able to explore each character's plotlines, but as I read on, it was clear that Wallach was pretty good at expressing the individual voices and connecting their plotlines together in a way that made the book really seem like one story rather than several.

We All Looked Up deals with quite a few contemporary issues including "carpe diem", the importance of friends and family, slut-shaming, and even sort of the meaning of life- and despite touching on a lot of cliches, is able to portray these issues in a way that isn't cliched at all.

The only thing I didn't really like as much was the romance, but that was only because it was so frustrating. I can't deny that it was realistic, but I just couldn't really get invested in the romance because of several things that happened (which might be considered spoilers, so I won't mention them here).

In any case, this is definitely a book I'd recommend to those looking for something fresh in the contemporary genre.

Really liked it

Ratings
Overall: 8/10
Plot: 4/5
Romance: 3.5/5
Writing: 4/5
Characters: 5/5
Cover: 2.5/5

Simon & Schuster Australia are extremely generous and have 5 copies of We All Looked Up to give away! Open to Australian residents only.

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Check out the full tour schedule below!