The End of the World Running Club by Adrian J. Walker ~ #bookreview

January 18, 2018 

Title: The End of the World Running Club

Author: Adrian J. Walker

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark 

Release date: September 5, 2017

Source: Borrowed from the library 

Purchase: Amazon | B&N 

My Rating: 

Synopsis

Perfect for fans of The Martian, this powerful post-apocalyptic thriller pits reluctant father Edgar Hill in a race against time to get back to his wife and children. When the sky begins to fall and he finds himself alone, his best hope is to run – or risk losing what he loves forever.

When the world ends and you find yourself forsaken, every second counts. No one knows this more than Edgar Hill. Stranded on the other side of the country from his wife and children, Ed must push himself across a devastated wasteland to get back to them. With the clock ticking and hundreds of miles between them, his best hope is to run -- or risk losing what he loves forever.

The premise of The End of the World Running Club intrigued me, but the characters annoyed me, especially the main character, Edgar (Ed). 

Ed is married with two young children, and he has to be the whiniest character I've ever encountered, and I've read a ton of books over my lifetime so far so that's saying something. I'm a wife and mom, and I totally get that sometimes it can be a monotonous life with the routine of going to work everyday and coming home. HOWEVER, Ed was disgusting with his pathetic worldview, and I genuinely hope he's the exception and not the rule. 

Once the action began with Ed hurrying his family into the cellar with some supplies he threw together at the last minute, I was horrified. I felt every ounce of anxiety, tension and panic that Ed felt when he knew shit was about to hit the fan. It took my breath away. 

But once that was done, I ended up slogging my way through the rest of the book. It was long, and there were many details that were unnecessary in my opinion. 

As you can tell, I hated Ed and never warmed up to him, not even when he makes a transition from a complete douche to  slightly becoming a better person. I just didn't care for him or about him at all. 

The group of people with whom Ed finds himself consisted of vastly different personalities coming together to survive and get to Ed's family and the hope of a better place with food, water and medicine. I loved Harvey, and Bryce grew on me quite a bit. I never liked Richard and didn't care if anything happened to him. Grimes was the only female, and she was okay but kind of bland. 

Ed and his group meet various people on their journey with some who were helpful and others who were downright cruel and dangerous. That's one of the themes of The End of the World Running Club - if you manage to survive the cataclysmic event that triggered the apocalypse, then you not only have to worry about basic human needs but also running into violent survivors who would do anything to stay alive, include killing you for your supplies. You don't know who you can trust. 

Overall I thought the quality of writing was good with the exception of needless tiny details where no action took place. I don't think Ed was meant to be a likable character, so I wasn't upset about hating him. The running included in this story made it a bit more interesting. All in all, I wouldn't highly recommend this book, but if you are interested in a post-apocalyptic story with adult characters, you might want to give this one a try.  

Quotes I Liked  

In the end, I thought, this is how we all end up: running alone through our own wilderness, the landscape of disjointed events that form our lives, with nobody to make sense of it but ourselves. The road is ours, and ours alone. 

You don't run thirty miles; you run a single step many times over. That's all running is; that's all anything is. If there's somewhere you need to be, somewhere you need to get to, or if you need to change or move away from where or what you are, then that's all it takes. A hundred thousand simple decisions, each one made correctly. You don't have to think about the distance or the destination or about how far you've come or how far you have to go. You just have to think about what's in front of you and how you're going to move it behind you.

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