A teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving.
Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.
Only he isn’t sure he wants to.
After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year.
Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.
But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world—and his pain—be destroyed forever.
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“Narrator Gibson Frazier’s youthful projection captures this first-person story well. He delivers tonal shifts that reflect Henry’s emotions as the story progresses and produces realistic voices for the other characters. He also captures Henry’s wry humor as he contemplates what it means to control the fate of the world.”
— AudioFile
“[This] bracingly smart and unusual YA novel blends existential despair with exploding planets.”
— Shelf Awareness (starred review)“An unflinching portrait of the pain and confusion of young love and loss…Topics like dementia, abuse, sexuality, and suicide…entwine with the messy work of growing up.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Combines the best of elements of Nick Burd’s The Vast Fields of Ordinary with hints of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Highly recommended.”
— School Library Journal (starred review)“Hutchinson’s excellent novel of ideas invites readers to wonder about their place in a world that often seems uncaring and meaningless. The novel is…dramatic and crackling with characters who become real upon the page.”
— Booklist (starred review)“[Henry’s] journey is subtle and hard-won…Bitterly funny, with a ray of hope amid bleakness.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Shaun David Hutchinson is the author of numerous books for young adults, including The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley, which won the Florida Book Awards’ Gold Medal in the Young Adult category and was named to the ALA’s 2015 Rainbow Book List; the anthology Violent Ends, which received a starred review from VOYA; and We Are the Ants, which received five starred reviews and was named a best book of January 2016 by Amazon.com, Kobo.com, Publishers Weekly, and iBooks.
Gibson Frazier is an audiobook narrator and an actor who has performed with such distinguished off-Broadway theater companies as the Civilians, Les Freres Corbusier, the Vineyard, the Cherry Lane, New Georges, the Foundry, and Clubbed Thumb. He is a founding member of the Los Angeles–based theater company Buffalo Nights. He has been named as one of the Village Voice’s favorite actors.