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We Are the Ants Paperback – May 16, 2017
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From the “author to watch” (Kirkus Reviews) of The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley comes an “equal parts sarcastic and profound” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving.
Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. 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.
Only he isn’t sure he wants to.
After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year.
Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.
But 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. 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.
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMay 16, 2017
- Grade level9 - 12
- Reading age14 years and up
- Dimensions5.5 x 1.4 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-101481449648
- ISBN-13978-1481449649
- Lexile measureHL800L
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Editorial Reviews
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A 2017 ALA Top Ten Rainbow List Title
“A beautiful, masterfully told story by someone who is at the top of his craft.” –Lambda Literary
“Unfailingly dramatic and crackling with characters who become real upon the page.” –Booklist, starred review
“Bitterly funny, with a ray of hope amid bleakness.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Hints of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five… Highly recommended.” –School Library Journal, starred review
“Hutchinson has crafted an unflinching portrait of the pain and confusion of young love and loss.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Wonderfully written… bracingly smart and unusual.” –Shelf Awareness, starred review
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chemistry: Extra Credit Project
Life is bullshit.
Consider your life for a moment. Think about all those little rituals that sustain you throughout your day—from the moment you wake up until that last, lonely midnight hour when you guzzle a gallon of NyQuil to drown out the persistent voice in your head. The one that whispers you should give up, give in, that tomorrow won’t be better than today. Think about the absurdity of brushing your teeth, of arguing with your mother over the appropriateness of what you’re wearing to school, of homework, of grade-point averages and boyfriends and hot school lunches.
And life.
Think about the absurdity of life.
When you break down the things we do every day to their component pieces, you begin to understand how ridiculous they are. Like kissing, for instance. You wouldn’t let a stranger off the street spit into your mouth, but you’ll swap saliva with the boy or girl who makes your heart race and your pits sweat and gives you boners at the worst fucking times. You’ll stick your tongue in his mouth or her mouth or their mouth, and let them reciprocate without stopping to consider where else their tongue has been, or whether they’re giving you mouth herpes or mono or leftover morsels of their tuna-salad sandwich.
We shave our legs and pluck our eyebrows and slather our bodies with creams and lotions. We starve ourselves so we can fit into the perfect pair of jeans, we pollute our bodies with drugs to increase our muscles so we’ll look ripped without a shirt. We drive fast and party hard and study for exams that don’t mean dick in the grand scheme of the cosmos.
Physicists have theorized that we live in an infinite and infinitely expanding universe, and that everything in it will eventually repeat. There are infinite copies of your mom and your dad and your clothes-stealing little sister. There are infinite copies of you. Despite what you’ve spent your entire life believing, you are not a special snowflake. Somewhere out there, another you is living your life. Chances are, they’re living it better. They’re learning to speak French or screwing their brains out instead of loafing on the couch in their boxers, stuffing their face with bowl after bowl of Fruity Oatholes while wondering why they’re all alone on a Friday night. But that’s not even the worst part. What’s really going to send you running over the side of the nearest bridge is that none of it matters. I’ll die, you’ll die, we’ll all die, and the things we’ve done, the choices we’ve made, will amount to nothing.
Out in the world, crawling in a field at the edge of some bullshit town with a name like Shoshoni or Medicine Bow, is an ant. You weren’t aware of it. Didn’t know whether it was a soldier, a drone, or the queen. Didn’t care if it was scouting for food to drag back to the nest or building new tunnels for wriggly ant larvae. Until now that ant simply didn’t exist for you. If I hadn’t mentioned it, you would have continued on with your life, pinballing from one tedious task to the next—shoving your tongue into the bacterial minefield of your girlfriend’s mouth, doodling the variations of your combined names on the cover of your notebook—waiting for electronic bits to zoom through the air and tell you that someone was thinking about you. That for one fleeting moment you were the most significant person in someone else’s insignificant life. But whether you knew about it or not, that ant is still out there doing ant things while you wait for the next text message to prove that out of the seven billion self-centered people on this planet, you are important. Your entire sense of self-worth is predicated upon your belief that you matter, that you matter to the universe.
But you don’t.
Because we are the ants.
• • •
I didn’t waste time thinking about the future until the night the sluggers abducted me and told me the world was going to end.
I’m not insane. When I tell you the human race is toast, I’m not speaking hyperbolically the way people do when they say we’re all dying from the moment our mothers evict us from their bodies into a world where everything feels heavier and brighter and far too loud. I’m telling you that tomorrow—January 29, 2016—you can kiss your Chipotle-eating, Frappuccino-drinking, fat ass good-bye.
You probably don’t believe me—I wouldn’t in your place—but I’ve had 143 days to come to terms with our inevitable destruction, and I’ve spent most of those days thinking about the future. Wondering whether I have or want one, trying to decide if the end of existence is a tragedy, a comedy, or as inconsequential as that chem lab I forgot to turn in last week.
But the real joke isn’t that the sluggers revealed to me the date of Earth’s demise; it’s that they offered me the choice to prevent it.
You asked for a story, so here it is. I’ll begin with the night the sluggers told me the world was toast, and when I’m finished, we can wait for the end together.
Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers; Reprint edition (May 16, 2017)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1481449648
- ISBN-13 : 978-1481449649
- Reading age : 14 years and up
- Lexile measure : HL800L
- Grade level : 9 - 12
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1.4 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #102,866 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Shaun David Hutchinson is the author of numerous books for young adults, including The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley, which won the Florida Book Awards’ Gold Medal in the Young Adult category and was named to the ALA’s 2015 Rainbow Book List; the anthology Violent Ends, which received a starred review from VOYA; and We Are the Ants, which received five starred reviews and was named a best book of January 2016 by Amazon.com, Kobo.com, Publishers Weekly, and iBooks. He lives in South Florida with his adorably chubby dog, and enjoys Doctor Who, comic books, and yelling at the TV. Visit him at ShaunDavidHutchinson.com.
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Published in January 2016, this 465-page novel has two central anchoring ideas. The entire novel is an account of Henry's life for one year prior to 29 January 2016. The daily events happening to and around him will influence his decision to push the Big Red Button. If he pushes it, planet Earth continues; if Henry's despair is so great and he does nothing, the Earth ceases to exist. Only Henry knows this. It is not that it is a secret, he has tried to tell others about his frequent abductions by the aliens as they continue to check with Henry and emphasize that the decision is completely Henry's to make. Henry's attempts at telling others has earned him the name “Space Boy.”
With such a serious decision to make, readers might think it would be a good idea to keep Henry happy. That brings us to the second anchoring point that appears throughout the novel, the suicide of Jesse. Henry loved his boyfriend and believes that he, Henry, was responsible for his boyfriend's death. Henry is bullied in school both for his belief in aliens (Space Boy) and for his openly homosexual relationship that he had enjoyed with Jesse. One of the biggest bullies is a very rich high school athlete, Marcus. This appears quite strange because Marcus and Space Boy are in a covert homosexual relationship that developed as Henry tried to find a substitute friend to fill the void resulting from Jesse's suicide. The many, many incidents of school bullying center more on the alien factor than the homosexual one.
This novel explores the issue of homosexual relationships in a way that is the best I have ever read by not exploring it. Throughout the novel, there is simply an acceptance of Henry's lifestyle choice. His mother accepts it and even wants to have a safe-sex talk with him. Audrey, the closest person to Henry that might be called a girlfriend, accepts Henry's choice. That is probably because she was a best friend to Henry and Jesse before the suicide and she was aware of the boys' relationship. Because Henry blames himself for Jesse's suicide, he has withdrawn from even the platonic relationship he had with Audrey. Audrey is sad about this and tries throughout the story to rekindle their earlier relationship. The reader will learn (not a spoiler) that Audrey also feels guilty because she believes she was the reason for the suicide. Even Henry's grandmother, Nana, accepts Henry's choice when she can remember to think about it. She is suffering from Alzheimer disease; her struggle is an important story-within-a-story and contributes wonderful insights on the progression of life.
Marcus as the choice to fill the void of the dead Jesse could not continue as a relationship with Henry. One-half of the time spent in satisfactory sex contrasted with the second-half of the relationship spent in administering punishing physical violence to Henry was a bomb waiting to go off. Luckily for Henry, the arrival at school of a new guy, Diego Vega, provided an alternative. Starting out on a very platonic and intellectual relationship, there were signs that a sexual component would evolve. The conflict here was that Diego (also called Valentin) had a deep, dark secret that he refused to reveal to Henry. All Henry's attempts to question Diego were rebuffed. Google searches about his life before Henry returned no results. Honesty and openness were important to Henry; nothing could proceed without a transparent base of honesty and full disclosure.
The character interactions in the book are brilliant as they engage in dialogues defining their relationships. Henry mentions that he loves his brother, Charlie, because he has to but as far as daily life, Henry despises his brother. As the novel progresses, Henry finds that he didn't really know much about Charlie. Henry engages in dialogues with Nana despite her frequent mental absences when she is not sure who he is. Henry's advice to his mother on life choices is ironic and is the one point where I had to almost suspend belief. How can a person this young make such great, deeply philosophical observations? I found myself using a highlighter frequently as Henry made observations that were stunning philosophically stated with such simplicity.
There are some really great “outtakes.” These are chapters depicting how Planet Earth might disappear for reasons other than Henry failing to hit the Big Red Button.
This is one of the books I recommend highly for all ages (mostly 12 and up). Young people will empathize with the depictions of classroom life. The sexual angle is done with no sleaze and no unnecessary referencing. The importance of strong family relationships is emphasized even though Henry's family appears to be the definition of dysfunctional.
And then there is THE QUESTION. Did Henry push the Big Red Button?
This is such a good book. Sincerely.
A snippet from School Library Journal on the back cover said -- “Hints of Slaughterhouse-Five.” And I thought, comparing yourself to Vonnegut is setting a pretty high bar... but, yes, hints of Kurt Vonnegut, indeed. Of course, Hutchinson isn’t Vonnegut (who is?) but just like with my favorite Vonnegut novels, this book begs to be quoted, but has so many quotable lines that tie back into themselves that it becomes impossible for me to figure out where I want to start or stop quoting it, until finally I decide instead of reading you any of these passages, I should just make you read this book.
On the surface this book is about some real concrete story point things. It is about a boy named Henry Denton who is abducted by aliens and given the absurd power to decide the fate of the world, while struggling to deal with his own family and relationship drama, with a doomsday clock quietly counting down in the background. But then it is also about a lot of other things. It is about grief. It is about being fifteen and weird. It is about hooking up with the wrong person because you can or because they are there or because you don’t think you deserve any better… It’s about being human and insignificant in the grand scheme of things and whether or not that should stop you from caring about living…
One of my favorite Vonnegut quotes is, "Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have someone say that?"
This book is about what a bummer it is to be a human being, how short, brutal, and absurd our lives are, and whether or not we should keep making the choice to live them anyway.
I really enjoyed finding out whether or not Henry Denton would decide to spare humanity… almost as much as I enjoyed all the various Sci-fi theories he proposed as possible world ending phenomena for when the doomsday clock eventually ran out.
I want you to read this book. And, some of you, I know, will never actually read this book... whether because it isn’t your taste or you’re too busy or you just don’t enjoy reading… but I want you to read it, anyway. Like, I know if you started reading this book, you would want to keep reading this book, and I don’t think you would regret reading it. It’s just that kind of book.
It has my ringing endorsement, but let's put it on the project scales.
First up: The Queer Counterculture Visibility Scale. The main character was white, male, and gay. I’m giving points here for: Class issues, a side character’s sexuality being more fluid than a binary Gay VS. Straight, and a very honest look at mental health. I also kind of like that the struggles that our main character was having in his life did not revolve around his sexuality. Things weren’t tense because he was gay, but because he was being abducted by aliens and no one believed it. I don’t know if it is weird or not to give it a half point just for not being another coming out story, which are great and necessary, but are really saturating the YA genre… but it’s my scale, and I made it up, and I can score it however I want.
3 out of 5 stars
Secondly: The Genre Expectation Scale. This is a young adult novel, in that the main character is a fifteen year old boy, dealing with highschool, family, relationships and the pain of figuring out what kind of human being he is. But it easily surpasses any expectation I would have for the “Juvenile--fiction” Genre. It is well written and poignant without being pretentious. It is able to be dark without having to turn off the lights and nihilistic in a way that doesn’t actually reach hopelessness. It is a well crafted, well thought out, and well edited novel.
5 out of 5 stars
(easily)
Top reviews from other countries
Reviewed in India on December 4, 2020