Milo and Marcos at the End of the World

 

Here is a book, Milo and Marcos at the End of the World by Kevin Christopher Snipes, that I think I found from one of those “readers who like X also liked Y” bits you see. I had also never heard of this book before, totally crickets, but one thing about me? I will always be down for a new queer book.

I will also quickly mention, there’s a lot of religion and religion-based homophobia and hatred in this book, so if that’s something you don’t want to deal with or read about, I would recommend avoiding this book.

In the blurb, Milo Connolly has managed to survive most of high school without any major disasters, so by his calculations, he’s well past due for some Epic Teenage Catastrophe. Even so, all he wants his senior year is to fly under the radar. (That’s how it’s worded in print.) Everything is going to plan until the dreamy Marcos Price saunters back into his life after a three-year absence. Milo is forced to confront his feelings he’s kept buried from his religious parents and community. Then strange things have been happening around his sleepy Florida town since Marcos’s return – sinkholes, blackouts and hailstorms. Mother Nature is out of control, and the closer Milo and Marcos get, the more disasters seem to befall them. So, to shorten it down, since there’s already so much, is there a bigger force trying to stop them from being together, and is their love worth the end of the world?

That was a lot of blurb. And that was with me cutting it down. But that does mean the book was set up nicely. Marcos comes back into Milo’s life and as they get closer, weird things start happening. That was the basic gist. I’ll be honest, I had no idea what to expect going into this book and no expectations.

Chapter one opens on Milo waiting for his bestie, Van Silvera, and he mentions that he hates waiting, is one of those people that thinks if something can go wrong, it will, and that he hates the idea of being the centre of attention. Then the chapter ends with Van showing up with Marcos and the Earth trembling. Like this book really got itself together, getting our two leads to one another. Homegirl was on a mission and said, “We’re going to get them here right now!” But yes, there’s a literal earthquake when the two first touch and a lot of the vibes of these opening chapters is Milo coming to terms with the fact that Marcos is magically back in Port Orange, Florida, after being gone for like three years. You end up seeing a little bit of Milo’s parents and how they’re devoutly Christian and, I won’t lie, kind of problematic. They say the kind of stuff that you would either kick off over hearing or just physically cringe at.

Then there’s this chunk, pretty early on, that’s a flashback to three years earlier where Milo and Marcos meet – at church camp lol. I will say, I was thinking that what would have happened between the two of them that it would have been bigger than it actually ended up being. I also thought that what would have happened between them would have been more dramatic, but it wasn’t. Lots of religious fear, though.

And those religion-based feelings and fears were very present for Milo throughout, and they ended up being the basis of why he ended up feeling the way he felt, or why he did a lot of what he did. You could also tell that he wasn’t comfortable with himself, or what was going on in his head, and that ended up leading to some quite intense and uncomfortable interactions between him and the people that he cared about. He ends up forcing himself to go to a party at one point, and that whole section was so just hrrrrrrgh vibes.

I suppose that religion that had been instilled in him also made him quite, I think the word I want is, repressed. He ends up fighting himself and his own mind on pretty much anything that Marcos wants to do. There’s this moment where he’s on a date with Marcos and he spends the majority of the time paranoid and thinking that everyone around them knows that they’re on a date. And the more this went on, I could definitely see how this constant paranoia and anxiety that Milo has would be annoying to some people. There’s a bit, and I’m not going to specifically give events, where something happens, and it’s smarter for Milo and Marcos to not contact each other over a weekend, and Milo is just losing it over having the person he likes going ghost mode on him. This was the bit where I saw a little bit of myself in Milo. I’m not a religious person myself, but that anxiety of just being in the dark, that I’ve experienced, and that anxiety is crushing.

Now, one thing I’ll always ask for is details about your characters. I think this is just a thing I like in books. I like knowing characters’ taste in music, I think that might be just because when I write, music is always worked into it. And actually, saying that, that could have been something clever with Milo. I don’t remember whether it was mentioned whether his parents controlled the content he consumed, including music. Like, he could have loved Christian music, Christian rock, because it was the only music he was allowed to listen to growing up, but there was just nothing like that and I feel like things like that never came up. Pretty late into the book, Marcos’ mother tells Milo that Marcos is good at art but is very shy about his skill. That’s cute in concept. The issue was that Marcos’ art skill only ever got brought up once after his mother mentions it. It appears once in the book and then never again. It was like it was set up to be something, but just never was.

Milo’s best friend, Van, however, I really liked her. She had that snarky, annoying personality I like in characters. As a better word, she was a menace, and I love the menaces. She was that character that was there to put a lot of the other people in their place and to keep them grounded when they started doing dumb shit. She also actually had some stuff going on in terms of personality and who she was where other characters didn’t, so, snaps for Van.

I did have a different idea of the whole “end of the world” bit as well. I don’t know, I think I was expecting more apocalypse, like literal world ending, dystopia vibes. So I was disappointed in that respect, I won’t lie. The whole book ended up being less about the actual, literal, end of the world like I was thinking it would be and more about religion with a bunch of extremely coincidental natural disasters thrown in to keep the plot going.

So now you know that whole thing where some people will say things just to say them? That’s kind of what the final part of this book felt like. The book is separated into different parts, like there are literally pages that will just say “Part I”, “Part II”. Part IV… This was the part that was the saying things just to say them. There’s a bit in it where Milo’s personality just completely changes. There’s a bit that gets, to quote Bob the Drag Queen, wild and just… I don’t know that I can say that I enjoyed it. There’s this one sound on TikTok that’s just someone saying the word “Huh?” over and over again, and that’s exactly how I felt reading the last part of this book felt like. It was like such a massive shift from what the rest of the book was, like just a completely different vibe and feeling to what had been happening throughout the book that it kind of just felt out of place, or strange to read.

To wrap up, I’d say this book got off to a solid start. The whole being gay in a religious setting is something that is very relevant to a lot of people and as the book got going, it stayed on a solid path. It was only in that last part where it really lost me. To repeat myself, it really did feel like it was just saying things for the sake of saying things, like a good chunk of the final part felt like it didn’t really fit in, thematically, with the rest of the book.

Okay, bye!