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Away We Go

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

“Funny, heart-wrenching, and wickedly smart, Away We Go is everything I love best about Emil Ostrovski's writing. This is a great novel!”—Andrew Smith, Printz Honor–winning author of Grasshopper Jungle

With an innovative format that includes interstitial documents, such as flyers, postcards, and handwritten notes, Away We Go is an often funny, honest look at the struggles of first love and tragic heartbreak that will resonate with fans of the critically acclaimed Grasshopper Jungle, by Andrew Smith, and Noggin, by John Corey Whaley.

Westing is not your typical school. For starters, you have to have one very important quality in order to be admitted—you have to be dying. Every student at Westing has been diagnosed with PPV, or the Peter Pan Virus, and no one is expected to live to graduation. What do you do when you go to a high school where no one has a future or any clue how to find meaning in their remaining days?

From the author of the acclaimed The Paradox of Vertical Flight, an Indie Next Pick.

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    • Kirkus

      November 15, 2015
      Intellectual boys' boarding school story meets near-future dystopia in this end-times tale. Like the other 600,000 American children and teenagers with Peter Pan Virus, Noah attends a school--of sorts. The "recovery centers" are a cross between internment camps and underfunded classrooms. They're badly misnamed, as well, as nearly all PPV sufferers die in adolescence. Blocked from phone calls, the Internet, and outside contact, Noah finds solace in banter and existential despair, hiding in the toilet stall-turned-library that's the best his recovery center offers. When he transfers to Westing, the sole prep school for PPV kids, Noah finds an idyllic New England haven where students read Whitman while seeking their inner Michelangelo or Sappho. The students, however, are just the same as everywhere else: dying teenagers. Noah nurses his alcoholism tenderly while exchanging droll repartee with the object of his affection. No, not with his girlfriend, Alice, but with Zach, the extremely ill and, predictably, straight boy with whom Noah's enjoyed several tender hookups. Meanwhile, a meteor's headed for Earth. Thin worldbuilding and confusing time shifts detract only slightly; the imminent apocalypse serves primarily to accelerate the claustrophobic immediacy of boarding school angst. Noah and his friends form loving, believably complex relationships, caroming from suicidal ideation to conspiracy theory to a quest for the sacred in mundane death. Lovers of self-consciously witty nihilist profundities will be thrilled; alas that the snark is mired in the stale trope of tragic gay romance. (Dystopia. 14-17)

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • School Library Journal

      December 1, 2015

      Gr 10 Up-In the future, children and young adults are contracting the Peter Pan Virus by the hundreds and thousands. The disease is airborne, and to protect the population, infected youths are sequestered in recovery centers and clinics. Noah Falls has just been transferred to the Ivy League of recovery centers, Westing Academy. Away from parents and his boyfriend, he pins his affections on a boy who doesn't reciprocate, tarnishing his other relationships and increasing his feelings of self-loathing. Surrounded by people who love him, Noah is miserably alone. The emphasis in this work is not on the dystopian future disease but on character development and philosophical questions about life, death, and meaning. Noah is a nihilistic existentialist to the world, but inside he's searching for something to reassure him that he is truly alive. His search for meaning is universal and will resonate with readers beginning to question their future. VERDICT The complexity of the writing and underlying themes, as well as the language and sexual situations, makes this best suited to mature readers.-Heather Miller Cover, Homewood Public Library, AL

      Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from January 1, 2016
      Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* In a near future, teens who contract the Peter Pan virus (they never grow up, you see) are quarantined in facilities kind of like schools, but why invest in kids' educations if they're going to die before they can contribute something to society? That's why Westing, where Noah is lucky enough to attend, is so revolutionarythey take education seriously despite their students' truncated life expectancy, though it's still a prison, albeit a shiny one. As the threat of mysterious hospice care looms ever closer, Noah and his friends try to thrive. Does love matter when you're doomed? What about freedom? In a lyrical, raucous narrative interspersed with flyers, posters, and letters, Ostrovski follows Noah as he falls hopelessly in love with straight Zach; adores his shy but fierce best friend, Marty; seeks out connection in a string of meaningless sexual encounters; teems with guilt over his girlfriend, Alice; and tries to navigate a world that's definitely ending, if not due to the asteroid aiming toward earth, then the virus that will eventually ravage his body. Noah's snarky repartee and constant jokes belie the depth of his struggle, and the oscillation between his heartfelt interior thoughts and sometimes careless actions and words is both moving and infuriatingin other words, vividly human. An intelligent, thought-provoking exploration of living in spite of futility.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

    • The Horn Book

      July 1, 2016
      Noah drinks heavily and pines over a male classmate at Westing Academy, where teens infected with a mysterious terminal disease can have a "normal" high-school experience while slowly dying under quarantine. Noah and his friends try to divine meaning from their unique, limited existences in this cerebral near-future dystopia. While the characters' banter is often inscrutably philosophical, relationships between these teens are nuanced and complex.

      (Copyright 2016 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)

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