How to Pack for the End of the World audiobook

I tried multiple times over the past few months to get this book and I'm so glad I did. But the description doesn't say much about the actual plot, so I guess I'll describe it here.It's not actually a survival or apocalyptic story, but more of a contemporary with some mystery elements. Which is my favorite type of book. And it's set at a boarding school. Not the usual stuffy, strict kind, but more like the kind from the show "Zoey 101." Amina Hareli is starting her sophomore year there because of the constant anxiety and nightmares she suffers from at home, as well as her obsession with reading about potential impending disasters, that caused her parents to send her away. At the beginning of the year, she is invited to the school's "game night" (which my middle school/high school actually did) where she is introduced to a group that seems to share her obsessions, but all for different reasons: environmental activist Hunter, who tries as hard as possible to distance himself from his dad's oil corporation, fashion-blogger Chloe, who grew up poor in rural Pennsylvania and has a fear of nuclear accidents, tough-girl Jo, an orphan who was once homeless and appears very secretive to most of the school, and athletic Wyatt, a former commune member who was raised by doomsday preppers. They are inspired to start a club after one of them asks the question, "If the world were ending, would you rather die with your family and friends or have to survive on your own and build a completely new life?" They name themselves the Eucalyptus Society and meet in the school's old bomb shelter, where they take turns challenging themselves to increasingly difficult survival-based games and simulations. Hunter takes the group out into the woods to gather plants and determines who would have the most edible ones, Amina hypothesizes a dramatically split country where money is very scarce, Chloe gets everyone to find an abandoned room and decorate it for a secret end-of-the-world party, and Jo's approach is possibly the most intense of them all: a challenge to see who can go the longest without using electricity. Meanwhile, someone is targeting the group anonymously by publicly humiliating them one-by-one. It's not likely that someone from the group is involved, but does Amina really know her new friends as well as she thinks she does?Trigger warning: Anti-Semitic hate crime mentioned towards the beginning, not in too much detailI related a lot to Amina and her constant "doom-scrolling" as I've struggled with anxiety for the majority of my life and tend to fixate on what could possibly go wrong. There was a part of every Eucalyptus Society member that I loved (such as Jo's nicknaming everyone!) and wanted to keep reading about. I definitely was hoping that none of them were behind the pranks. That reveal, speaking of, was satisfying.as well. I just wish that there was more closure with how the Eucalyptus Society dealt with the perpetrator.

Thank you Iread Book Tours for a complimentary copy. I voluntarily reviewed this book. All opinions expressed are my own. How To Pack For The End Of The World By: Michelle Falkoff REVIEW ☆☆☆☆There is no literal end of the world or apocalypse happening in How To Pack For The End Of The World. The story throws Amina, a new scholarship student suffering from paranoia about the world ending, and a few other boarding school teens with a shared interest in prepping together, and as friends, they face the challenges of teenage life. Dramatic in true teen fashion with no major surprises, Amina and friends create and enact situations that mimic possible apocalyptic scenarios to determine what the reality of such a situation might be like. Personally, I like this idea for real because it could be tailored to teach survival skills for apocalyptic possibilities. Let's be honest, we live under the constant threat of world ending and/or altering scenarios every single day. But, I digress. The story strikes me as a sort of metaphorical ending of one stage of life for these teens, and as the hopeful seeds of adulthood are planted, each character must carry on into the unknown grownup world. It's not so different from starting over after the end of the world because it all involves taking chances, having faith in yourself and believing tomorrow will be a better day. No zombies are present, and no life and death chases or contests are held. Amina grows into a young woman who recognizes the skillset necessary to survive and thrive on any given day is just as vital as prepper knowledge. For the most part, the story is one of character growth, self realization and acceptance of inevitable change. But, Amina knows she need not face the future alone. How To Pack For The End Of The World is an insightful and clever, contemporary, young adult novel from Michelle Falkoff that works on many levels. It is appropriate for young adults and adults with an interest in dystopian and apocalyptic fiction. I highly recommend this thought provoking story!

How to Pack for the End of the World reads very quickly. I really enjoyed the creativity of each of the kids’ games they made up. The friendships between them are interesting and complex like any relationship in life. I thought the end was a little awkward and rushed. The author seemed to really want it all tied up in a nice bow with a very happy ending and I’m not sure that really made sense. With so much of it being like real life, I thought the ending wasn’t really believable, at least not without more explanation added. Otherwise, though, I loved it. I recommend it to anyone teens and up.

** spoiler alert ** I got this book as an ARC from Harper Collins. Amina and her friends at their new school decide to create a survivalist group. Throughout the first half of the school year, they each come up with different games, encompassing things they each think would be important if the world ended. When someone seems to be attacking members of their group, they all have to figure out who and why this is happening to him. There are some twists and surprises along the way. Overall, I thought this was a good book. I was surprised by several things in the story, which doesn’t happen very often. I’d definitely recommend it to just about everyone.

Ever since an attack on her synagogue, Amina becomes obsessed with anti-Semetic behavior and has begun to live in fear with recurring nightmares.  When a scholarship position to the prestigious Gardner Academy opens up, Amina's parents send her in order to change her mindset.  Amina is very unsure about Gardner, but attends a pre-orientation game night where an interesting question in Would You Rather captures her interest.  The question leads to a gathering of five people from the game night: Wyatt, Hunter, Chloe, Jo and Amina.  Amina finds that she has plenty in common with the group, they all have fears.  Moreso, she finds a group of friends that she is comfortable with.  However, someone seems to be targeting their small group with very personalized attacks and Amina has a new set of fears to deal with.How to Pack for the End of the World is a contemporary Young Adult fiction that deals with a lot of issues in a unique way.  None of the issues become too heavy and none of the characters are designed around their fear, social standing, sexuality or mental health.  They are all just regular teens dealing with everyday issues.  Each character was well developed and unique.  While their backstories and challenges weren't all divulged at once, this added another layer of mystery to the story.  I loved the idea of the Eucalyptus Group and how each game they played helped them develop more as well as get to know one another.  The personal attacks were another added layer that almost seemed like a side story to me but were really more at the heart.  It was difficult for me to forget that this story took place at a high school and involved kids that were 16 to 17 years old as some of the situations felt more at a college level and classwork seemed to take a back seat.  Overall, an entertaining young adult story with amazing characters.This book was received for free in return for an honest review. 

This is a very different book than what I usually read, and though I have a much different viewpoint on what will happen at the end of the world, I did the different aspects of the story the students have kind of interesting.Amina’s parents sends her to a prestigious boarding school because she is obsessed with the end of the world and they are hoping this will help with the anxiety she has been having. After there a few days at the school she is invited to a mysterious meeting along with four other with somewhat the same anxiety problems and the same reasons for their anxiety. As they discuss their anxieties, they each contribute with their survival skills and help with ways to survive when the day happens.I liked the students in this group. They were a little weird at times, but they are not the usually boarding school students. It was sometimes difficult for me to keep listening because the story doesn’t have a lot going on except for the survival skills of the group. I would have liked more depth to the story. There wasn’t a lot of wow there.I have the audio version of this book. I really enjoyed listening to the Narrator, Stacey Glemboski. She has an excellent smooth voice for audiobooks. Her dynamics and expressions are just perfect. I hope to find more books that she is narrating. She is one voice I could listen to all day!This book is a four star for me. And if I could rate the narration, I would rate it a 5 plus Stars!A special thanks to the author/publisher for a copy of this book. I am not required to write a positive review, the opinions here are mine alone. I am disclosing this with my review in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

Michelle Falkoff has written a timely, thoughtful, provocative book that I couldn’t put down. The plot is filled with unexpected, compelling twists, each character is vividly imagined, and Amina’s narrative voice is a beautiful balance of innocence and intellect. HOW TO PACK FOR THE END OF THE WORLD gave me hope that there is a path forward from these precarious times to a place where empathy instead of rancor reigns.

the title of this book was v misleading but overall i really enjoyed reading it. certainly a booked that explored friendship and family but with a love interest. I like that I didn’t make the romantic relationship the main theme. not too predictable in my opinion so definitely an interesting read.

Amina has just started a new school due to her anxiety and consistent focus on dooms-day situations. She finds some like-minded friends, and they create a new group where they focus on survivalist techniques. They create increasingly intense and difficult challenges that the group needs to succeed in. Someone is attacking the group one by one on social media though, and the need to figure out who it is.I really enjoyed this story. I thought the plot was intriguing, and I found myself surprised over and over again by what was going on. It was easy to become invested in what was happening! This wasn’t a stressful read, and I appreciated that. My favorite parts were when the group played their survival games. I thought they were so interesting!I really enjoyed the main character, Amina. She was relatable, and I understood her continued focus and anxiousness about the what-if scenarios.Overall, this was a fun, easy read that I would recommend to anyone!Content Warning:There is a situation that involves some anti-semitic actions.I was provided a gifted copy of this book for free. I am leaving my review voluntarily.All of my reviews can be found at https://shejustlovesbooks.com/all-boo...

I would like to thank the author Michelle Falkoff, the publisher HarperCollins, and iReads Book Tours for access to an eARC of this title in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to iReads for the opportunity to participate in the blog tour for this title. Thank you to Michelle Falkoff for trying your best to get me hooked up with a copy through NetGalley. Thank you to my influencer program contacts at HarperCollins for hooking me up via Edelweiss when we ran into regional troubles with the NetGalley listing. It was an adventure, for sure! This has not swayed my opinion on the review. My thoughts are my own and my review is honest. This book is not at all what I thought it would be from the title and official synopsis, but I wouldn't say that's a bad thing. I may not have read the book I thought I was going to read, but the book I read was excellent none the less! Amina is entering 10th grade at Gardner Academy, a private boarding school you generally either attend because you earned a scholarship or because something went wrong and you've been sent away. On the first night Amina attends a "game night" for incoming first years that's full of the typical icebreakers and the predictably gross and scandalous teenage questions in "Would you rather?" until someone asks the group about the end of the world. If the world were to end tomorrow and no one you knew and loved would survive, would you choose to die with them or survive and rebuild? In the coming days, Amina and four other students (including Wyatt, the boy who posed the question) form the Eucalyptus Society, a club that I like to think of as "Doomsday Preppers Lite." Over the course of their first two quarters, each of the club's five members holds a "game" to determine who would be best prepared for their end of the world scenario. This book tackles non-Christian religion in a Christian dominated setting (specifically Judaism,) BIPOC issues and inter-racial relationships, LGBTQIA issues, and characters learning to trust and how to deal with betrayal. Content warnings for building fire linked to a hate crime (remembered event pre-book timeline), character recalling sexual and physical assault, racism, bullying, protests, and various reasons that some characters have "run away" in various degrees from their families and previous environments to this school. This book also features characters experiencing symptoms of PTSD and depression.If I were any of the teenage club members in this book I would be Jo, the closed-off and mysterious tough girl with rainbow boot laces and an obviously tragic back story that she doesn't care to share. I adored optimistic and genuinely kind Wyatt. I was occasionally frustrated with Amina for how socially blind she was about her friends and classmates, but it did make sense as a character flaw for a 16 (15?) year old girl from a secure and unbroken family. The nativity of youth! The hate crime that drove her to anxious doomsday research is the only smudge on her rose-coloured glasses so far, and it shows. She's afraid of the system imploding in on itself, but trusts individuals implicitly. The other two cub members are Hunter, the climate activist born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and Chloe, the Instagram model who's all about influence. What holds me back from rating this book a full five stars is that this book almost seems to forget that these are high school students attending school. Classes hardly factor into the story at all, and once Amina has won the student council election we don't see or hear what her meetings and duties are like. Her Jewish club meetings only come up when she's campaigning for student council, when Eucalyptus Society might interfere, and when the plot requires that she talk to a friend who isn't in the Eucalyptus Society. Her roommate is relevant three times, despite this taking place over half a school year. I understand that this book is about the Eucalyptus Society games and social unit, but like other YA titles I've read that take place in a boarding school setting that don't remind the reader about classes and roommates and such, it starts to feel more like college kids on a college campus. These are 15/16-year-old teens making age-appropriate snap decisions. It's important to remember how young they are. I expected a book with outdoorsy events and actual survival situations. I got a book about troubled teens at a boarding school learning how to thrive in a found family, and I loved it! I read it in one day and really enjoyed the experience. It was well-paced (despite the lack of class & student council interludes I would have liked for the high school feel reminders) and the characters were all relatable in different ways. I will definitely be keeping my eye out for novels by Michelle Falkoff in the future!--Note: I wrote this review for a blog tour. If you're interested in the full post and quick access to the rest of the tour, visit: westveilpublishing.com/?p=3597

How to Pack for the End of the Worldby Michelle FalkoffPub Date: 10 Nov 2020read courtesy of http://netgalley.comPut five different competitive high schoolers together to see who can survive hypothetical apocalyptic disasters, and you get five unique interesting challenges. Falkoff crafted an entertaining story that expertly incorporated five different characterizations into the survival scenarios. I found some fairly profound truths in this story that resonated with me: (1) "I hated that I tended to assume people were straight unless they indicated otherwise." (2) "Funny how different it felt, having a crush versus liking someone who liked you back. I'd had butterflies with Hunter, but they'd made me feel a little bit sick. Wyatt made me feel nothing but happy." (3) "We'd been so fixated on managing big-picture problems that we hadn't yet learned how to deal with the day-to-day complexities of being ourselves..."Unfortunately, the author used some standard YA story formulas that I tend to dislike. For example the characters don't tell others how they feel but then expect others to be mind readers and act a certain way. In addition, this author actually comes out and has a character articulate another overused plot line "...where we need to help ourselves because the adults weren't going to be of much use."Throughout the book, the lead character Amina frequently claims she doesn't know her friends as well as they know her. The purpose of this characterization is so she can eventually prove she does end up knowing one her friends better than her other friends do. The repetitive self-deprecation, however, is annoyingly tedious. Nonetheless, I like the ending in which the characters learn to be " ...less concerned with what we put in our go-bags and more about how to use cooperation and empathy to prevent the things we were so scared of from happening." I only wish that Falkoff had listened to her own advice. Why was it necessary for her to call out 'Republican' vs. 'Democrat' in a doomsday scenario in which a Republican was so "unpopular" that he got elected for a third and fourth term?Since the good messages outweigh the trite precepts, I will enjoy putting this book into the hands of my high schoolers.

How to Pack for the End of the World Takes a Fictionalized Look at Teen Pressures. This book takes a group of teens from various lifestyles and life experiences and bonds them within a boarding school setting. The outside pressures and fears of both the external world events and daily teen insecurities and struggles are presented via the group's individual personalities, values, and pasts. As the teens work through various challenges to prepare themselves for the end of the world, they share and learn survival skills for both real-world, day-to-day dilemmas and the hypothetical demise of the outside world.How to Pack for the End of the World isn't Action-Packed--But, Realization Packed. This book doesn't have any real suspense-filled mystery or any life-or-death action adventures. What it offers is a fictionalized look at life with relatable characters and teen drama. Readers won't find a big secret to solve (though there is a prankster to be caught)--and they won't see substantial plot twists or thrills. Readers will find many scenes and events leading to some self-realization, character growth, and life skill learning.Would I Recommend How to Pack for the End of the World by Michelle Falkoff? While I didn't love any of the characters in this book--I found them to be reasonably realistic teens with real-world problems combining with self-esteem/self-doubt and fears of the future. Older readers may find some of the dialogue and thought processes immature--but I think that adds to this book's unique character/storyline flow. For fans of young adult, dystopian fantasy novels--this book is a unique look at planning for the end of the world--while living life as real-world teens. I think it would appeal to a variety of teen readers. I received a copy of this book from the author or publisher. All opinions are my own.

I really enjoyed this more than I was expecting. Reviews have been so split on this, I wasn't certain what I would think. But, I enjoyed it quite a lot. I emphasized a lot with the narrator character and her worries about the collapse of society. I'm also of Jewish descent, my grandmother on my mother's side was born in Germany during the Holocaust and was one of the survivors. My family is non-practicing though my mom shared some Jewish traditions when I was growing up. So, I could understand a lot of Amina's perspective and her anxiety. I'm queer and liberal politically and Jewish and sometimes the state of the world feels actively hostile to everything I care about and am. When Trump was elected, god, I was a mess. I'm an anxious and fatalistic person by nature, and wow, it was really hard to stay positive when I felt like the world was crashing around me. Sometimes I still get that fluttery, panicky feeling and anxiety dreams never really go away.And I don't even need to get into environmentalism here. I'd send myself into a spiral. Basically, I got why these kids would start a survivalist club. I understood the anxiety intensely, and I loved how passionate these kids got. I loved the characters and their relationships. The only flaw I think was the book wraps up maybe a little too quickly. We get a resolution of the drama going on, and get answers on the slight mystery, but the wrap up really glosses over how things got resolved. I still liked the message at the end on what they learned from the club, and it was touching, but I still felt like it could have used more. Anyways, it was good. I enjoyed it. Worth checking out if the premise peaked your interest.