Graphic: Death, Gun violence, Violence, and Abandonment Moderate: Domestic abuse

Thank you Netgalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review! And hoo boy will this be honest. This was just bad. It was break-neck pace where things were given a max of a page and then swiftly moved onto the next thing, characters were super flat and had no growth, so many "plot points" introduced and went no where, absolutely no real logic and super inconsistent for the imagined logic presented too. The characters are just... really flat and feel like just a bullet point list of potential character ideas that have yet to be turned into actual characters. The mother has a phobia or severe anxiety of some sort, but it's treated horrifically badly and is literally one of the points of contention and anger at the end which is NEVER RESOLVED. Don't give this book to any kids that have a form of social anxiety, it's demonised pretty much at the end and it just really doesn't feel great to read. There's no growth to any of them, they all start how they end. The 2 main characters have a defining trait each (... mostly) and the rest barely have even that. There's way too many characters as well, I kept forgetting the main 2 had a sister and the majority of the side characters just have a couple lines sprinkled throughout. Absolutely no reason to have so many introduced at the start and just more keep being added... The inconsistencies drove me mad as well. The red line kept dropping a few feet apparently each time, but it barely dropped at all, and seemed to be dropping at different rates across the same street? The "redlining" was mad as well, I'm pretty sure "surface tension" of air doesn't entirely negate gravity.. They tried to give a scientific explanation for that but it doesn't really stick. Everything turns out to mean pretty much nothing in the end as well, and the general timeline of everything - I genuinely couldn't tell you how many days, weeks, this book covers. Pacing is absolutely wild. Things legit get about a page and that's it. Someone dies, and it takes a page from the kids to learn he's dying, to him being dead and then instantly switches to the next scene/topic/conversation right after. Nothing is given any room to breathe or be actually explained. Nothing is shown, literally everything is only told. A lot is also just not resolved, the main plot ending is very neatly wrapped up and resolved through absolutely no input from the characters, it's just "the book's ending now, situation just happened to be resolved now because *shrugs*", but a lot of the side things are just completely left untouched - like the mothers' anxiety/phobia and the "problem" that caused. The whole mental health thing in this is also wild. It's just thrown in randomly, random characters have random mental health issues and nothing is explained, resolved, or even has a place. A kid just randomly goes "I have mild depression but it's ok" and it's just, ignored I guess for the rest lmao. Like this is not how you do mental health topics in books at all, or medication around that as well. I can appreciate trying to teach global warming and such to children, but I think terrifying them about being unable to breathe suddenly maybe isn't the way to do that? This book in the end feels very doomer and "there's really nothing you can do in the end, you're just going to die anyway" unless a complete miracle entirely out of your control happens. There's nothing about what could have been done to prevent it or anything, it's just "the adults screwed up now we're gonna die".