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fishfish's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
jrei45's review against another edition
4.0
Shaun David Hutchinson uses physics and outer space and the universe as a metaphor in his books in such a beautiful way. Something very interesting about his writing is that he gives closure without giving answers. He gives us an ending to the book while leaving a lot up to the reader to decide, and I am caught between wanting more information and being satisfied with what he’s provided. I was surprised by how fast I zipped through this book. It is so similar to his other book We Are The Ants, yet so different. It is as if he used the same general outline for both books but filled the slots with different information. Regardless, both that book and this one are beautifully written. I would recommend.
eliathereader's review against another edition
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
3.25
“Hayatın verdikleriyle mutlu olmayı seçebilirsin,” dedi, “ya da hayatın sefaletle geçer. Mutluluğu seç. Bu kadar basit.”
.
Shaun David Hutchinson genç yetişkin türüne farklı bir bakış kazandırmayı başaran yazarlardan. Evrenin Kıyısında Duruyorum çevrilen son kitabıydı ve okumasam olmazdı. Ana karakter Ozzie’nin evrenin neden daraldığını ve bunların onunla ne ilişkisi olduğunu öğrenme çabasını anlatıyor. Aynı zamanda ortadan kaybolan erkek arkadaşını bulmaya çalışıyor ki enteresan olanı herkes erkek arkadaşının varlığını unutmuş durumda. Hem psikolojik rahatsızlıklara hem de lise hayatına odaklanan bir roman. Aslında gerçekten enteresan bir konuya sahip ama kitapta en büyük şikayetim her şeyin çok yavaş hissettirmesiydi. 350 sayfalık kitap kendini 500 sayfa gibi okuttu. Ben evrenin neden daralıyor olduğuna dair o kadar çok teori oluşturmuştum ki son bölümlerde gizem çözülünce bu muydu diye söylendim. Çok daha farklı bitirilebilirmiş gerçi sevenler yine olacaktır ama benim için hayal kırıklığı oluşturdu. Karakterler iyi oluşturulmuş, hiçbiri basit yazılmamıştı ve hikayenin gidişatı sonlara kadar güzeldi. Sadece sonu daha iyi olabilirdi bence. Yazarın diğer kitaplarını daha çok beğenmiştim bu ise Çünkü Biz Karıncayız kitabıyla aynı sırada yer aldı gibi.
.
Shaun David Hutchinson genç yetişkin türüne farklı bir bakış kazandırmayı başaran yazarlardan. Evrenin Kıyısında Duruyorum çevrilen son kitabıydı ve okumasam olmazdı. Ana karakter Ozzie’nin evrenin neden daraldığını ve bunların onunla ne ilişkisi olduğunu öğrenme çabasını anlatıyor. Aynı zamanda ortadan kaybolan erkek arkadaşını bulmaya çalışıyor ki enteresan olanı herkes erkek arkadaşının varlığını unutmuş durumda. Hem psikolojik rahatsızlıklara hem de lise hayatına odaklanan bir roman. Aslında gerçekten enteresan bir konuya sahip ama kitapta en büyük şikayetim her şeyin çok yavaş hissettirmesiydi. 350 sayfalık kitap kendini 500 sayfa gibi okuttu. Ben evrenin neden daralıyor olduğuna dair o kadar çok teori oluşturmuştum ki son bölümlerde gizem çözülünce bu muydu diye söylendim. Çok daha farklı bitirilebilirmiş gerçi sevenler yine olacaktır ama benim için hayal kırıklığı oluşturdu. Karakterler iyi oluşturulmuş, hiçbiri basit yazılmamıştı ve hikayenin gidişatı sonlara kadar güzeldi. Sadece sonu daha iyi olabilirdi bence. Yazarın diğer kitaplarını daha çok beğenmiştim bu ise Çünkü Biz Karıncayız kitabıyla aynı sırada yer aldı gibi.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Self harm
kovost's review against another edition
5.0
I think this book might have possibly temporarily broken me. For a lot of different reasons.
And I really shouldn’t have expected any less from Shaun David Hutchinson because he did, after all, casually ruin my life for weeks with We Are the Ants—but, like an idiot, I didn’t really go into this book bracing myself. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t. If I learned anything from We Are the Ants, it’s that it doesn’t really matter how strange a summary or a concept seems with this man because there’s something more to it, but I apparently blanked out the moment I started reading because you’d have thought this was my first experience with one of his books.
But it’s like this:
Shaun is painfully, concerningly, and unapologetically good at reminding you that you’re human.
When I wrote my review for We Are the Ants, I said that it took me apart and then put me back together—because it did. Although Hutchinson ripped me up with that one, he did put me back together by the end. This book is… well, it’s different. It’s different in a lot of ways and yet the same.
It’s the same in the sense that it ripped me apart; in the sense that it took parts of me that I didn’t even wholly know existed and it broke them. It broke me cruelly and brazenly. And it’s different in the sense that it didn’t put me back together. It left me as I was, which led to some crying, I’m not even going to lie about it. The state I was in by the time I finished this book legitimately put me in tears. I was incredibly dramatic about it on Twitter because the hilarity of the situation seemed so dramatic at the time (there was rain, alright) but in all seriousness, the only thing I could do to cope with the ache in my chest was stand there and cry. Not the blubbering kind or even really the kind where someone can tell you’re crying unless they looked you directly in the face, but in that weird way if I tried to explain why I was crying, like if I opened my mouth at all, it probably would’ve spiraled into that because it hurt.
Which—and here’s the catch—that’s not to say it was an unhappy ending because it wasn’t. It wasn’t happy in the “happily ever after” sense of the word, but it wasn’t unhappy either. It just… was. It simply was. It was so coldly realistic that it felt like getting slapped across the face. It was startling and jarring because where I expected Ozzie to end up in a different position, he didn’t and I realized that there was no other way for him to end up when he ended up on the other side. He was so far upside down throughout the entire book that there literally was no other position for him to land in, and I hadn’t realized that until the very last sentence.
I think the most ironic part of this book and the whole “let’s analyze what it meant to me” is that it made me feel normal. Not because it was so damn weird that I, a self-declared weirdo, felt normal in comparison but because there was so much diversity in this book that for once, it didn’t seem so lonely and strange to be me. Lua is genderfluid, Dustin is asexual, Calvin is bisexual, and on top of diverse sexualities, it wasn’t one big cast of white characters (which was acknowledged so many times, it was beautiful). It was a haphazard group of teenagers trying to navigate their own lives because soon they’d have to deal with the real world and everything would seem meaningless, and no one was the same and it felt natural. It didn’t feel like Hutchinson was trying to pack the book full of as much diversity as he could simply to say that he did. It was real, it was natural, and it was simply there. They were all deeply flawed and that made them so painfully human. Their trauma, their struggles, their feelings, and their lives were so raw.
There’s a whole universe just in the meaning and depth of that itself, which you can approach scientifically like Ozzie did the entire book or you can take it more as one big metaphor. I chose a little of both, but mostly the latter because I like to psychoanalyze things.
A universe without Tommy meant learning how to move through life on his own finally (although it could be theorized that it was created as a coping mechanism to deal with the pain of losing him after the break-up because Ozzie had no idea who he was without Tommy and the reality of that really kicked him in the face but to be fair, he’s not even sure whether or not it was something he made up). And a shrinking universe to push him to get out of Cloud Lake for himself because at the rate he was going, he was going to stay there for the rest of his life, either for Tommy or because he was scared to venture the unknown.
Because there’s a whole world out there and if things are meant to happen, if you’re meant to have things, they’ll find you. They’ll always find you because the cosmos is kinda funny like that.
All in all, I’d recommend this book in a heartbeat, I really would. It hurts because it’s the cruelty of being human, it reminds you of all the little things, but it’s beautiful and heartbreaking and yeah. Yeah, it was definitely an out-of-body experience because it kind of stripped me down and I still feel like I haven’t covered everything that I wanted to talk about, but I also have accepted that like I said earlier, there’s never going to be enough words in any language to even begin to describe how this book made me feel, so. The best I can do is recommend that you read it.
--------------------------------------
01/28. I'm... I don't really know how to put what I'm feeling into words right now. I really don't. My hands feel weird like they're not even attached to me. Like reading this book was an out of body experience and I haven't really come back down to earth (har-har, ironic). And I'm probably going to have that strangely detached ache that The Perks of Being a Wallflower left me with, and that urge to cry because I miss something I never had like I did after I read History Is All You Left Me. And it's just. It might be a bit before I can actually write a review for this because there's so much I want to talk about, but much like how I felt after We Are the Ants, I don't think there are words for it. I don't think there will ever be enough words in any language to describe even half of what I'm feeling right now. So I want to, but I don't want to and basically. Basically, I have to breathe.
After I kind of do that weird shifty thing where I'm really not crying, but I actually kind of am.
And I really shouldn’t have expected any less from Shaun David Hutchinson because he did, after all, casually ruin my life for weeks with We Are the Ants—but, like an idiot, I didn’t really go into this book bracing myself. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t. If I learned anything from We Are the Ants, it’s that it doesn’t really matter how strange a summary or a concept seems with this man because there’s something more to it, but I apparently blanked out the moment I started reading because you’d have thought this was my first experience with one of his books.
But it’s like this:
Shaun is painfully, concerningly, and unapologetically good at reminding you that you’re human.
When I wrote my review for We Are the Ants, I said that it took me apart and then put me back together—because it did. Although Hutchinson ripped me up with that one, he did put me back together by the end. This book is… well, it’s different. It’s different in a lot of ways and yet the same.
Spoiler
Though, speaking of We Are the Ants, I saw them both. I saw the reference and I saw the cameo, ok. Beautiful.It’s the same in the sense that it ripped me apart; in the sense that it took parts of me that I didn’t even wholly know existed and it broke them. It broke me cruelly and brazenly. And it’s different in the sense that it didn’t put me back together. It left me as I was, which led to some crying, I’m not even going to lie about it. The state I was in by the time I finished this book legitimately put me in tears. I was incredibly dramatic about it on Twitter because the hilarity of the situation seemed so dramatic at the time (there was rain, alright) but in all seriousness, the only thing I could do to cope with the ache in my chest was stand there and cry. Not the blubbering kind or even really the kind where someone can tell you’re crying unless they looked you directly in the face, but in that weird way if I tried to explain why I was crying, like if I opened my mouth at all, it probably would’ve spiraled into that because it hurt.
Which—and here’s the catch—that’s not to say it was an unhappy ending because it wasn’t. It wasn’t happy in the “happily ever after” sense of the word, but it wasn’t unhappy either. It just… was. It simply was. It was so coldly realistic that it felt like getting slapped across the face. It was startling and jarring because where I expected Ozzie to end up in a different position, he didn’t and I realized that there was no other way for him to end up when he ended up on the other side. He was so far upside down throughout the entire book that there literally was no other position for him to land in, and I hadn’t realized that until the very last sentence.
Spoiler
And yeah. Yeah, losing Calvin hurt and losing Tommy hurt, but I wouldn’t have preferred anything else when I think back on it. Ozzie did exactly what he needed to do for himself in the end. He was too dependent on Tommy (which Tommy saw) and that was it: Ozzie didn’t know how to navigate life without Tommy. He didn’t know where Tommy ended and he began, that was the problem. And god, Ozzie was so heartbroken that he blanked out the moment Tommy broke up with him and the next day, he woke up in a universe where Tommy didn’t even exist to anyone but him for 96% of the book and said universe was shrinking to keep him in Cloud Lake, but then he was too dependent on Calvin to cope, and he did what he had to do and I’m glad he did it with Lua.I think the most ironic part of this book and the whole “let’s analyze what it meant to me” is that it made me feel normal. Not because it was so damn weird that I, a self-declared weirdo, felt normal in comparison but because there was so much diversity in this book that for once, it didn’t seem so lonely and strange to be me. Lua is genderfluid, Dustin is asexual, Calvin is bisexual, and on top of diverse sexualities, it wasn’t one big cast of white characters (which was acknowledged so many times, it was beautiful). It was a haphazard group of teenagers trying to navigate their own lives because soon they’d have to deal with the real world and everything would seem meaningless, and no one was the same and it felt natural. It didn’t feel like Hutchinson was trying to pack the book full of as much diversity as he could simply to say that he did. It was real, it was natural, and it was simply there. They were all deeply flawed and that made them so painfully human. Their trauma
Spoiler
because fuck, Calvin’s whole storyline shattered me into pieces and then Warren’s accident rubbed some salt into itSpoiler
Also, I think I understand what the meaning of the alternate universe was. I mean, whether or not it was all in Ozzie’s head or not remains up for debate because there’s a lot of fragments around that could back up either side of the argument. Like the fact that there were certain things that still remained the same in the ‘stable universe’ when Ozzie came back; such as Warren’s accident, his parents selling the house, Calvin being his lab partner and his entire trauma, Dustin’s parents, so on and so forth so I mean, there’s a lot of things that could be used to argue either side, but I do think I see what it meant. The whole ‘universe without Tommy’ and said universe shrinking until it was only Cloud Lake left.There’s a whole universe just in the meaning and depth of that itself, which you can approach scientifically like Ozzie did the entire book or you can take it more as one big metaphor. I chose a little of both, but mostly the latter because I like to psychoanalyze things.
A universe without Tommy meant learning how to move through life on his own finally (although it could be theorized that it was created as a coping mechanism to deal with the pain of losing him after the break-up because Ozzie had no idea who he was without Tommy and the reality of that really kicked him in the face but to be fair, he’s not even sure whether or not it was something he made up). And a shrinking universe to push him to get out of Cloud Lake for himself because at the rate he was going, he was going to stay there for the rest of his life, either for Tommy or because he was scared to venture the unknown.
Because there’s a whole world out there and if things are meant to happen, if you’re meant to have things, they’ll find you. They’ll always find you because the cosmos is kinda funny like that.
I turned to leave when Tommy said, “Hey, Ozzie? You think we’ll ever find each other again?”
I nodded. “I’ll always find you. No matter how big the universe is, I will always find you.”
All in all, I’d recommend this book in a heartbeat, I really would. It hurts because it’s the cruelty of being human, it reminds you of all the little things, but it’s beautiful and heartbreaking and yeah. Yeah, it was definitely an out-of-body experience because it kind of stripped me down and I still feel like I haven’t covered everything that I wanted to talk about, but I also have accepted that like I said earlier, there’s never going to be enough words in any language to even begin to describe how this book made me feel, so. The best I can do is recommend that you read it.
--------------------------------------
01/28. I'm... I don't really know how to put what I'm feeling into words right now. I really don't. My hands feel weird like they're not even attached to me. Like reading this book was an out of body experience and I haven't really come back down to earth (har-har, ironic). And I'm probably going to have that strangely detached ache that The Perks of Being a Wallflower left me with, and that urge to cry because I miss something I never had like I did after I read History Is All You Left Me. And it's just. It might be a bit before I can actually write a review for this because there's so much I want to talk about, but much like how I felt after We Are the Ants, I don't think there are words for it. I don't think there will ever be enough words in any language to describe even half of what I'm feeling right now. So I want to, but I don't want to and basically. Basically, I have to breathe.
After I kind of do that weird shifty thing where I'm really not crying, but I actually kind of am.
melg14's review against another edition
3.0
3-3.5 stars
The low rating as the do with the anti-climactic reveal. Someone likened this to Adam Silvera. No.
I liked the message of moving on and being brave and ready enough to step into the unknown but how it all built up just didn’t make sense.
The low rating as the do with the anti-climactic reveal. Someone likened this to Adam Silvera. No.
I liked the message of moving on and being brave and ready enough to step into the unknown but how it all built up just didn’t make sense.
Spoiler
You’re telling me that every day for a month or so he made up some convoluted scenario because Tommy broke up with him? Nah, that makes absolutely no sense. Like why even develop feelings for Calvin when it never happened and he does nothing about it???electrikreads's review against another edition
3.0
I'm rewriting this review. I love Shaun David Hutchinson's writing and I put this as a 5/5 originally...but there are a lot of issues with this book, from plot holes to ableism that I somehow didn't realize until after the book. I thought I loved this, but just like with All The Bright Places, some time to sit on and think about it made me realize that this book just wasn't as well thought out as I thought it was.