64 pages • 2 hours read
Marieke NijkampThis Is Where It Ends
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Personal Relationships and Family Trauma
Intersections between personal relationships–brother and sister, child and parent, and between two young lovers–pervade This Is Where It Ends. Nijkamp propels the narrative arcs forward by exploring each narrator’s relationship to Tyler.
Tyler and Autumn’s mother’s death tears Tyler apart, and his father descends into heavy-drinking. Autumn’s mother’s absence, and Sylv’s mother’s sickness, brings the two girls closer. Claire breaks up with Tyler about a year before the shooting, the night of the junior prom. That same night, Tyler attacks Sylv. The next day at school, Tomas pins Tyler to a locker for what he did to Sylv and this becomes the day Tyler drops out of Opportunity High School.
As significant as the series of events leading up to Tyler dropping out are, the threads of narrative explorations that grow out of these events are even more significant for the novel. In this way, Nijkamp weaves various relationships throughout the novel and raises personal relationships effected by family trauma to a major theme. Tyler says to the students in the gym: “Do you know what it feels like to lose everything you hold dear? Your family? Your girlfriend? For your entire town to turn against you too? Arrogant Tyler. Idiotic Tyler. Outcast Tyler. I’m reclaiming Opportunity” (102).
The web of events that stem from Sylv and Autumn’s relationship is central to This Is Where It Ends. Tyler holds a grudge against Sylv, who, in Tyler’s eyes, steals Autumn from Tyler. “Keep the hell away from my sister” (133), Tyler tells Sylv, the night of the junior prom. “After Mom died, I had no one anymore,” Tyler tells Autumn, when Autumn confronts him onstage. “Do you know what it feels like to be all alone?” (147). “All of this is your fault” (148), Tyler tells Autumn.
Meanwhile, Sylv and Autumn’s relationship is deep and loving. Sylv’s love for Autumn inspires Sylv to approach the stage in the auditorium and, later in the book, to run back inside from the roof, away from safety. Related is the deep love Tomas displays for Sylv and his fellow students. In addition, Autumn’s love for Sylv inspires Autumn to sneak away from the exodus of students to confront Tyler a second time.
Heroic Courage
The classic hero theme is a major element in This Is Where It Ends. All four narrators follow an arc that begins close to a moment of fear and ends with Tomas, Sylv, Autumn, and Claire transforming their fear into courage in the face of extreme danger. Nijkamp creates narrative distance by completing the different hero arcs in different ways, and at different times.
Tomas’s courage to save Sylv—alongside the chance to transform his rebellious, reputation with a brave act—in tandem with Fareed leads to students being able to escape the auditorium. Tomas and Fareed also contact the police. Further, it’s Tomas’s courage that leads to his death.
Autumn knows she must act and refuses to let Tyler kill or injure the entire student body. Her ability to confront her brother, despite fears that Tyler will kill her, raises Autumn’s actions to heroic levels. Autumn becomes even stronger when she makes a second bold decision to seek out Tyler in the Opportunity High hallways.
How News Spreads Through a Community
This Is Where It Ends presents a complex portrait of the narrative behind a school shooting and the way in which the news of a shooting spreads in a community, through rumor, mass and social media, text messages and phone calls.
While each chapter proceeds in chronological time, according to the clock, Nijkamp delivers backstory and facts essential to creating different perspectives about Tyler, and each narrator, in a non-linear fashion. This structural decision mirrors the way news of the shooting, and of the events and backstories leading up to the shooting, spreads through the community of Opportunity. The characters are always examining their pasts in attempts to contextualize and understand the present. The book's structure indicates how a complex web of meaning frames an event like a school shooting when one tries to understand the motives behind the event.
Nijkamp’s manipulation of time allows room to explore the different ways this day unfolds for different characters. The tweets, or Mei’s blog, which conclude each chapter, and the news crews that swarms the parking lot, indicate how little information is available at first. Claire touches on this point towards the end of the book, as names of the dead are reported:
With every new name, someone breaks down and someone else holds them up. At the entrance to the student parking lot, police officers inform parents and families to report to Opportunity’s church […] But few of them leave. Instead, they stay here, together. And even if they sought comfort elsewhere, we’d all know where to find whomever we needed. Opportunity is no place for secrets (252).
This narrative strategy for communicating information indicates that the only way to begin to understand these tragedies is to examine the situation from many different angles, to examine how information about the shooter is formed, to empathize with all parties, and to understand how the shooting is a community problem.
