We Are the Ants
A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) From the "author to watch" (Kirkus Reviews) of The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley comes an "equal parts sarcastic and profound" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving.Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button. Only he isn't sure he wants to. After all, life hasn't been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer's. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend's suicide last year. Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him. But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it...or let the world--and his pain--be destroyed forever.
BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
This would have been 5 stars for me but I felt it weighed too heavy in Henry missing his dead boyfriend. I loved the sci fi and the premise of the story though.
this is a 3.5 star review. I feel like the overall theme of overcoming your mental illnesses and the small analogies throughout the whole book were really really well thought out. I think the ending was a little frustrating because it left me with a lot of questions. I think this is a beautiful book that deserved to be analyzed and poured over academically but i didn’t particularly like it as a fun summer read.
A heavy, heavy weird fiction book that will make you feel heavy too.
This book is weird. It’s about depression, grief, teenagers anger, bullying…but most importantly— it’s real. Our main protagonist is deeply depressed, which was hard to read. This is certainly not what I expected but I am not mad about it. This is not a book for everyone. I really didn’t think I would rate this one high than but towards the end it just clicked with me and I will probably keep thinking about this book.
Halfway through this I was sitting there just waiting to be emotionally wrecked.
Come to me with it. Destroy my feelings!
Did it do the job?
Where did this lose me? Why did this lose me?
I think it's mostly because of Henry. I wanted to love Henry the way Diego loved Henry, but there was something about him that just annoyed the pants off of me. I wanted to empathize with this poor boy who had lost his boyfriend to suicide, who was losing his grandmother to Alzheimer's, who had a father who walked out, who was bullied physically and mentally on a regular basis, and who was (possibly) probed by aliens who abducted him on random occasions.
How did I read through all of this (in addition to some other terrible life things that happen to other characters that I won't spoil) and not really feel anything?
Either I'm a monster or this really is just 3 Stars.
Come to me with it. Destroy my feelings!
Did it do the job?
Where did this lose me? Why did this lose me?
I think it's mostly because of Henry. I wanted to love Henry the way Diego loved Henry, but there was something about him that just annoyed the pants off of me. I wanted to empathize with this poor boy who had lost his boyfriend to suicide, who was losing his grandmother to Alzheimer's, who had a father who walked out, who was bullied physically and mentally on a regular basis, and who was (possibly) probed by aliens who abducted him on random occasions.
How did I read through all of this (in addition to some other terrible life things that happen to other characters that I won't spoil) and not really feel anything?
Either I'm a monster or this really is just 3 Stars.
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.