We All Looked Up by Tommy Wallach

Title: We All Looked Up
Author: Tommy Wallach
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481418777

Four high school seniors put their hopes, hearts, and humanity on the line as an asteroid hurtles toward Earth in this contemporary novel.
They always say that high school is the best time of your life.
Peter, the star basketball player at his school, is worried “they” might actually be right. Meanwhile Eliza can’t wait to escape Seattle—and her reputation—and perfect-on-paper Anita wonders if admission to Princeton is worth the price of abandoning her real dreams. Andy, for his part, doesn’t understand all the fuss about college and career—the future can wait.
Or can it? Because it turns out the future is hurtling through space with the potential to wipe out life on Earth. As these four seniors—along with the rest of the planet—wait to see what damage an asteroid will cause, they must abandon all thoughts of the future and decide how they’re going to spend what remains of the present.

The hardest reviews to write are the ones where you feel in the middle, and for WE ALL LOOKED UP, that's exactly how I feel. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't love it either. The book started off strong and then lost it somewhere towards the middle for me.

I wasn't really indebted into the characters very much, and at some point I realized I was reading to find out what happened with the asteroid. I wanted to know the fate of the planet... not really the fate of the characters.

For me, I felt that the characters were kind of too crazy. I couldn't relate to them personally because they seemed so much the opposite of myself that I couldn't put myself in their shoes, and the decisions they made often irritated me more than anything.

I really wanted to love this book because I've heard so many good things, but it ultimately fell kind of flat for me.

I will say that the author's writing was good and I can definitely see where he was going with the decisions that he made, and the character development he portrayed - it was just lost on me personally.

I did enjoy the world building as it represented a society which crumbled in the face of disaster, which is something I feel would actually happen in the face of this kind of disaster.

Ultimately, if you're interested in books where the characters experience extreme transformations in the face of the apocalypse, this book is for you.