YOU & ME AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Two teens puzzle out their strange circumstances when they appear to be the only two people left on Earth.

Seventeen-year-old Hannah Ashton is a serious ballet dancer on the brink of an audition that will launch her professional career when she wakes up to discover the world basically unchanged—except that she is totally alone in her home city of Houston. After five days of anxious solitude, she is filled with relief when she encounters Leo Sterling, a cute fellow senior she barely knows from school, at a music store next to her best friend’s family’s bookstore. Leo, a free-spirited musician who plays in a band known for their ’80s hair metal covers, has known Hannah from afar only as “Ballet Chick,” but once they meet, they are immediately drawn to one another. Alternating chapters in introspective first-person narration juxtapose their respective thoughts. As events unfold, readers get to know their drastically different ways of coping—which are in overdrive as they try to navigate environmental changes in the strange, lonely world they now inhabit. Romance fans will thrill to the slow smolder of their drawn-out attraction, which twists and turns its way through psychological drama that, while unsubtle, is offset by the effective mystery of their isolated situation. Hannah and Leo are White.

Opposites attract in this engrossing romance.