If Tomorrow Doesn't Come at least I read a slay book

 

Today I’m talking about If Tomorrow Doesn’t Come by Jen St. Jude and this is one of those books that I read the little blurb/synopsis kind of deal that you see on the online listings and was immediately like, “Oh wow… I need to read this like stat.” It was that bad for me. I did also read the majority of this book over two train journeys. I went to London and had about four hours of time to be able to read, and got through about two-thirds of it, so my notes will be more scattered than normal.

The blurb says that on the morning Avery Byrne plans to end her life, the world discovers there are only nine days left to live. An asteroid is heading to Earth, and no one can stop it. As time runs out and secrets slowly come to light, Avery fights her way home to save the girl she has been in love with her whole life. But can Avery also learn to save herself and find hope again in the tomorrows she has left?

This book does also have a content notice, so I’ll share that: This book contains discussions of suicide, mental health, and homophobia. There are no graphic scenes of this actually happening, just awareness of and conversations about it. A central character deals with undiagnosed clinical depression.

So right from the off, Avery is planning on taking her life, like the blurb says, when her best friend, Cass (the one she’s been in love with), calls her to tell her that hackers got into NASA – you know, as they casually do – and that’s how we find out that there’s an asteroid heading for Earth that’s going to kill everyone. And with this news she decides that taking her life can wait because she needs to get to Cass. We do then pop over to a chapter where she’s falling in love with Cass for the first time, even though she doesn’t realise she’s falling in love with her. The gist of it is that Avery’s aunt took her own life in water, so Avery was deathly afraid of it until Cass helped her overcome the fear. You also see a church camp that she and Cass went to when they were fourteen. The two of them kiss at this camp which is where Avery begins to question everything about her life. She mentions it’s the first time she doesn’t feel God around her which leaves her with a shed load of questions. And given that she has been brought up so religiously, this has left her with a lot of religious trauma regarding her queer identity, which does become more of a hurdle for her throughout the book.

The book does actually jump between the present day, the countdown to impact, and the past leading up to where the characters are in the present. In the present you sort of see Avery and how, one, she was struggling back at the college she was at, and then in the chapters in the past, you see bits and pieces of her life through different ages. It goes from when she was a child, to a teen, to months before she decides to take her own life. You see how she goes from basically being the poster girl in high school, about how she seems to be so popular, yet she never hangs out with anyone, and then goes to being a loner in college. I did appreciate seeing both times in the chapters. They were nicely separated, so you always knew where you were, and I thought that it was a really good way of getting to learn about Avery and her past.

I did think that the whole book was going to be Avery trying to reach Cass, like that would be the ultimate goal. But they actually end up finding each other after about 60/70 pages and then just went from there. Speaking of going from there, it was wild seeing people preparing for what would essentially be the end of the world. You had the typical cases of people rioting and looting, violence, people trying to travel. Avery ended up meeting up with Cass and taking her roommate, Aisha, and one of her professors to her neighbourhood to be with her family, and her family’s choice was to try and create a bunker underground so that they could survive the impact – very Fallout vault style.

Also, given that the entire book was counting down to the impact, I assumed that the ending would either be just before the impact or as the impact happened and that we wouldn’t see anything afterward. Not to spoil the ending, but I was right. But realistically, how could anything continue after the asteroid? Not unless the book decided it was going to become a post-apocalyptic story with someone else, or even the same characters who managed to survive.

I saw a Goodreads review of this book that gave it two stars and complained about the ending, about how they don’t like “non-endings” and how they want to know whether characters end up okay or not okay. I can understand wanting that closure out of books, but I think it should happen when the book calls for it. I do personally prefer it when an ending is closed and that everything I want to be solved be solved, but I can also see the argument in books when things aren’t all perfectly resolved. This book is a prime example of that. Not everything was perfectly resolved, but that was kind of the point in this book. Even though we’ve got this looming asteroid over the planet, this book is about Avery and her emotional state – almost taking her life in the beginning. To me, it makes perfect sense that this book has a non-ending, because Avery isn’t going to have a magical cure for her depression in nine days, is she? She’s going to do what she did in this book, and look for the hope in the situation, that maybe the world isn’t as dark as she first thought. That’s what this book is about. So I don’t, personally, think there’s an issue with the ending, I was happy with it, because for once in my stupid life I understood an ending that required a modicum of thought.

I suppose if there was one thing I wanted more from with the book was that I wanted to know what other people were doing in the wake of the end of the world. By that I mean that you were told that there was looting, and you got to see bits of it happening, but for the most part, the characters just seemed to be able to go around and travel, and outside of the first part of the book where Avery is trying to reach Cass and her parents, you don’t really see much of the struggle. There is one part of the book where Avery and Cass go raiding in the neighbourhood, and come into conflict with a few other people, but that’s only one isolated instance. I think I maybe wanted more of the end of the world vibe, even though that’s not what the book was about.

Overall, I picked this up on the concept alone, thinking it would be just about two really good gal pals falling in love in the face of the end of the world. To an extent it was, but it also delved so much deeper than just let’s go lesbians vibes and touching on religious trauma in conjunction with the queer experience and depression. It’s one of those that, yes I enjoyed it, but given how serious certain parts of it are, I won’t be reaching for it for just a nice casual fun read.

Okay, bye!