Pictured edition: The End of the World is Bigger than Love by Davina Bell, Text Publishing 2020. ISBN 9781922268822. Cover illustration by Kate Forrester. Cover design by Imogen Stubbs. Image used on this blog under the “Fair dealing for criticism or review” provision of the Commonwealth Copyright Act, 1968. Surrounding design made by me using Canva.
Summer and Winter are identical twins who have been taken by their father to live on a remote deserted island to survive a social & environmental collapse, the nature and causes of which are slowly revealed over the course of the novel. Their father is then taken away under circumstances that aren’t explained until later, but they have each other, a large store of packaged food, their dead mother’s collection of classic novels and a secret hidden in the bell tower. They spend their time happily reading and foraging/preserving. Then one day, Edward arrives and things start to change.
I wanted to love this book. I expected to love this book. It had positive reviews from the Sydney Morning Herald. It had won Australian YA literary awards. It had a cool title, cool cover and a cool sounding premise. Someone even compared it to Station Eleven! But I didn’t like it as much as I’d hoped.
I enjoyed the first pages: Summer and Winter have intriguingly different voices, Summer being exuberant and verbose, and Winter being more taciturn. It’s clear from early on that they were unreliable narrators. I started to find it confusing at around the time that Edward is being described as a bear by Summer and a boy by Winter. I’m not sure what the literary rationale was for that, but I found it distracting. The whale was a bit contrived (although I enjoyed its voice) and Summer’s verbosity began to feel overwritten, which prevented me from immersing myself in her world.
There are many good and interesting elements here. But, although I usually enjoy imagery, intertextuality, ambiguity, unreliable narration and magic realism, overall, I didn’t feel that they quite came together in this book. Clearly, however, many other people loved it and no doubt would be enjoyed by young adults with a particular interest in the cli-fi genre.
Title: The End of the World Is Bigger than Love
Author: Davina Bell
Cover: Cover illustration by Kate Forrester. Cover design by Imogen Stubbs.
First published: Text Publishing, 2020
Length: 288 pages
ISBN: 9781922268822
Awards: Book of the Year for Older Readers, Children’s Book Council of Australia 2021; Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature, 2021
Genre: Post-apocalyptic, cli-fi (climate fiction), magic realism, YA
Representation: main characters are girls
Suitability: 16+
Fyi: suicide, eating & exercise disorders, pandemic, ecological disasters, executions, kidnapping, domestic violence, violence to animals, death of loved ones, terrorism, social media violence
Themes: love, grief, trauma, memory, the environment, social media, pandemic
Literary features/tropes: lots of imagery, lots of intertextuality, unreliable narrators, magic realism, alternating first person POV narration
NSW syllabus: could be a text for the Stage 5 genre study (post-apocalyptic or cli-fi) but has some very sensitive content (e.g. eating disorders), particularly for teenage girls, so would be a controversial pick. Potential wide-reading text.
If you like this, try: The Road to Winter by Mark Smith, An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE LIBRARY... 
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