My rating: ★★★☆☆
There is something especially unsettling about a zombie story that begins in a familiar, ordinary place. In Until the End of the World, Cassie and her friends must escape Brooklyn after an outbreak turns everyday life into a fight for survival. With the dead walking and society rapidly collapsing, it has all the ingredients for a tense apocalypse story.
I enjoy character-driven survival stories. The relationships between survivors matter because they give us a reason to care whether anyone makes it through. Reminiscing about the old world can also make the losses feel real. Here, though, those elements occupied so much of the story that they began to weaken the danger surrounding the characters.
There were long stretches devoted to memories, romantic feelings and unresolved relationships when I wanted more urgency. The characters are supposedly living through the end of civilisation, with dead people walking around and trying to take bites out of the living, yet they frequently seem more concerned with romantic navel-gazing.
Hellooo? Zombie apocalypse?
The final straw for me was Cassie becoming involved in pairing her recent ex with her best friend’s younger sister. Perhaps Cassie had never truly loved him, and some readers may see nothing uncomfortable about the situation. I did. It felt strange and far too entangled for me—especially when the characters had rather more immediate problems involving the collapse of civilisation and the walking dead.
The survival preparations and journey away from Brooklyn gave the story a promising foundation. Cassie’s family background also makes her more prepared than the average person suddenly thrown into an outbreak. Those details helped keep me interested, and the book was readable enough that I never disliked it completely.
My frustration came from the contrast between the scale of the catastrophe and the emotional tone. The stakes should have felt enormous, but the repeated focus on relationship drama made them seem strangely distant. I wanted the zombies and the collapse of society to drive the story, with the personal relationships developing naturally under that pressure—not competing with it for attention.
I gave Until the End of the World three stars. The survival premise had potential, but the emphasis on romantic discussion and complicated personal relationships was not what I wanted from the story. Although this is the first book in a series, I could not bring myself to continue beyond it.
Readers who enjoy relationship-focused apocalypse stories may connect with it much more than I did. Personally, I needed more survival horror, more urgency and considerably less time spent contemplating who still has feelings for whom while the dead are walking.
Recommended for: Readers who enjoy character-focused post-apocalyptic fiction, found-family dynamics and romance alongside their zombies.
Perhaps not for you if: You want a tense, horror-heavy zombie story in which survival takes precedence over relationship drama.