No Parking at the End Times
Author: Bryan Bliss
Publication Date: February 24th 2015
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~
Abigail’s parents have made mistake after mistake, and now they've lost everything. She’s left to decide: Does she still believe in them? Or is it time to believe in herself? Fans of Sara Zarr, David Levithan, and Rainbow Rowell will connect with this moving debut.
Abigail doesn't know how her dad found Brother John. Maybe it was the billboards. Or the radio. What she does know is that he never should have made that first donation. Or the next, or the next. Her parents shouldn't have sold their house. Or packed Abigail and her twin brother, Aaron, into their old van to drive across the country to San Francisco, to be there with Brother John for the "end of the world." Because of course the end didn't come. And now they're living in their van. And Aaron’s disappearing to who-knows-where every night. Their family is falling apart. All Abigail wants is to hold them together, to get them back to the place where things were right. But maybe it’s too big a task for one teenage girl. Bryan Bliss’s thoughtful, literary debut novel is about losing everything—and about what you will do for the people you love.
I give No Parking at the End Times props for being
different. Different it definitely was. I don't read that many religious
centred books, I usually stay far away from ones I know are going to be so, but
every now and then they sneak up on me. What drew me to this one though is the
cult-like fashion it was handled. The religious aspect wasn't bible-bashing,
but in a way a little bible-bashing but not overbearing, and it's delves into
faith verses religion. Can you have faith without having religion? When you
think about it, faith and religion go together, but faith does exist out of
religion. You don't have to have a religion to believe in God, to believe and
have faith in something unknown. Whether that's God, life, the future, it's
still faith.
