by Celine Lind
As I settled into my couch and curled around Sunny At The End of The World, a sad nostalgia reverberated through my body. The first pages contain loving quotes celebrating Steph Bowe’s brilliance, and a foreword by her mother and sister whom she is survived by. It’s a fitting tribute to an ingenious Australian author gone too soon (2020, Rare Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma).
My ecstasy at holding a new Steph Bowe book was briefly capped by this shadow of her passing, such that it feels inauthentic for me not to dwell on it for a moment. Steph Bowe’s Night Swimming (2017) was the first Australian Young Adult novel I ever knowingly read. My introduction to Steph and her writing was at a LoveYA Day held by the Brisbane Writer’s Festival in 2017. The shimmery blue face paint scrawled between her cheek and temple, framing her bright smile, is forever imprinted in my memory — as is the joy of reading the first page of Night Swimming and seeing a fellow teenage Australian girl staring back at me from within the pages.
Sunny At The End of The World, a manuscript discovered by her family and published posthumously, mirrored that experience. I was hooked from the onset; “Three days after the outbreak, my parents and I discussed exactly how we would kill each other other” — what a killer opening line!
If you haven’t yet guessed, the book is an Australian-set, zombie apocalypse Young Adult novel. It follows seventeen-year-old Sunny and Toby in the near aftermath of the outbreak in 2018, where Sunny has found herself bitten yet somehow still mentally intact, and Toby suddenly thrust into a paternal role over the abandoned baby he has decided to care for. It’s a lot for two seventeen-year olds to handle. Interwoven between these point-of-views is Vee’s perspective from 2034. Vee is living in an underground government facility; as is Sunny. How did the outbreak start? What is the world really like outside? And will venturing outside the facility and road tripping up to the Gold Coast in search of forgotten family members and answers bring the solace they seek?
Historically I have not been a fan of multi-POV books. There is always one POV I can’t care less about and I find myself speed reading through the perils of. However, in this book, I pleasantly found all three of our protagonists equally engaging and sympathetic.
Sunny, as a zombie who has maintained her mental faculties, brought plenty of humour and sharp wit. She’s a very active character who felt alive — pun-unintended — in every scene. She takes up space, offering her puns and insight and propels them forward in reaching resolutions and progressing their journey.
My favourite perspective may have come from Toby though. In addition to safeguarding a helpless baby, he is harbouring the weight of having thrown a party on outbreak day which led to the zombifying of all his friends and his crush. His point-of-view is written to the baby, highlighting his method of coping with the situation by focusing blindly on the task in front of him. Altogether, reading about a teenage boy figuring out how to care for a baby is equal parts hilarious and horrifying.
In Vee’s perspective we learn about the world post-outbreak in real-time with her. At the start of the book, an event occurs which challenges her prior beliefs around authority and the system she has always lived within. This moment catalysts her journey into the outside world where she, and you as the reader, begin to notice everything is not as it seems. Having Vee as a character experiencing the outside world for the first time allowed me as to be guided along with minimal exposition as Vee and I learned about the world through her trial and error. However, if I had to be critical, I would say her personal worries were slightly less interesting to me, in comparison to zombie-girl Sunny and newfound-parent Toby. Though only slightly.
A particular component of Steph’s writing I love is her ability to capture the feeling of being a teenager; often by gut punching you with relatability and/or heart-stabbing emotional build up. For instance, I enjoyed reading about Toby’s understanding of what it meant to be growing up: “Your parents (or in my case, parent) pretty much stopped shielding you from everything difficult and uncomfortable in your life. You knew you were growing up when your parents stopped telling you things were none of your concern.” This can be wonderfully juxtaposed to his written logs to the baby, where he occasionally trails off before finishing a particularly gruesome or sobering thought, admitting he shouldn’t be telling a child that. In the case of Sunny: through realising she is doomed to an eternally decaying body with perhaps no real death in sight, themes of accepting your body and disability can be found.
The other key aspect of Steph’s writing I would be remiss to forgo mentioning is her exhale-loudly-out-loud humour. Much of this occurs within the dialogue itself, but plenty of instances can also be found in the thoughts of all three of the protagonists. The humour feels written arm-in-arm with teenagers, and particularly I think, Gen Z. One such exchange I took note of was the following:
“Don’t worry. She’s a doctor.”
“I’m not,” the girl says. She is far less cheerful.
“Okay,” he concedes. “She’s a medical enthusiast.”
The quippy dialogue and quick descriptions makes for a fast paced read overall. Steph provides just enough detail for you to paint in the blanks with ease and keep reading at the swift pace of the story. I finished this book within 24 hours thanks to the speedy writing, engaging characters, and intriguing plot. The start has plenty of questions to keep you turning the pages, and the middle doesn’t meander. I can’t speak much of the final act of the book for fear of spoiling it for you dear reader, but allow me to say this: I need to re-read this book in light of the ending. When the back cover said Sunny At The End of The World turns the tables more than once it was not lying! The book left me with the feeling of waking up from a hyper-realistic dream such that I had to set it down and stare into space for a few minutes. My eyes are still drawn to it on my bookshelf now, waiting for me to re-live the story with my since acquired knowledge.
If you’re looking for a fun, fast-paced read with enjoyable characters and an atmosphere of life-or-death-at-every-turn adventure then Sunny At The End of The World is for you!
