We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson

He meets a new boy who offers him friendship and more, but he is too broken by grief to appreciate this chance. I had sympathy for this character, yet I thought he was whiny and self-absorbed, maybe just a typical teenager with too much on his plate. It seems that everything that could go wrong in his life is going wrong.

His mother is trying to hold everything together, and his father has been absent since his childhood. There are also crises going on in his family: grandma has dementia and his brother's girlfriend is pregnant. Henry is also being pursued by another boy who alternately bullies him and pursues him romantically. He also believes the aliens have given him the power to save the world from imminent destruction. He believes aliens abduct him and do experiments on him. He is grieving the suicide of his boyfriend Jesse and on the edge of a breakdown. In the manner of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Henry Denton is a self-absorbed gay teenager. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it.or let the world - and his pain - be destroyed forever. Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.īut Henry is a scientist first, and, facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend's suicide last year. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer's. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.Īfter all, life hasn't been great for Henry. Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. From the 'author to watch' ( Kirkus Reviews) of The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley comes a brand-new novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving.

We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson