The Great Big One

by J.C. Geiger

Everyone in Clade City knows the Great Big One is coming--a tsunami guaranteed to decimate the West Coast and sink their small coastal town. If they manage to live that long. Nuclear strikes seem increasingly likely. Wildfires. Solar flares, and a growing chance of apocalyptic horsemen. So Griff and the Lost Coast Preppers will be ready. Canning. Stockpiling. Monitoring radio signals. To survive, one must expect the unexpected. But the songs catch Griff and even his twin Leo by surprise.

What begins as a striking moment becomes a competition between Griff and Leo that divides the brothers: Griff toward music and Chastity, a striking new girl with an angelic voice; Leo toward his late-night prepping missions and stealing Chastity's attention away from Griff.

But when a mission to track the source of the music alters the course of Griff's understanding of life, which will win out: hope or fear?

• ISBN10: 0759555397
• ISBN13: 9780759555396
• Publish Date: 5 August 2021 (first published 20 April 2021)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 8 March 2024
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
• Imprint: Little, Brown Young Readers
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 384
• Language: English

Reviews

[lisbethwhite]

In The Great Big One, we meet a group of high school doomsday preppers, whose interest in music attracts a new student to their group of friends. The main characters, a pair of twins, as well as the new student (a girl who cares about music but isn’t a prepper), find themselves in a strained relationship as they struggle to balance their prepper meetings with their interest in surfing the Skip, looking for music up and down the AM radio dial at night. Midway through the story tragedy visits and, for the remaining friends, pain puts a pause on the progress of life. Eventually, though, the music they’ve heard on the Skip proves to be a siren song they can’t ignore, drawing them out of their small coastal town to the desert for an otherworldly experience that neither they nor the readers are likely to forget soon. Ultimately, the music is the beacon that pulls the friends back together and pushes them to figure out who they want to be. Although the characters and setting are wildly different from the experience of my own landlocked, urban students, I suspect the character’s search for themselves and the music will be a strong appeal.

Overall, I enjoyed this title. The start was a little slow, but picked up around halfway through. I think the writing could be mildly challenging, as there is lots of abrupt transition and written out sounds that might be off-putting to some readers. It's not my favorite style, but it wasn't so much that I didn't want to keep reading.