Meet me at the world's end was so easy to read.
This book is different for the first book in the series, Wake me after the apocalypse. The style of book is different, the first book the chapters were ‘Before’ the event and ‘After’ the event. It set up the character connections needed to tell the devastation of the story, and how one person's decision can ruin lives. Meet me at the world's end is written as a countdown.
We meet two new characters in a different bunker in the USA. Charlotte is the granddaughter of a very wealthy man who is heading up the BRP program (Bunker Reservation Project). Jack is a construction worker that dropped out of high school with anger issues, his oldest brother left the military at 18 to look after him when their parents died and hired Jack for his construction company.
Meet me at the world's end is a story about privilege and how humanity wants to try its best, but ultimately always reverts to self-preservation. Charlotte is allotted a space in a bunker simply because she is the granddaughter of the man heading up the program. She spends her time working as her grandfathers assistant, trying to help where she can, hiding her identity and the fact that she already has a place in the bunker even though they don't yet know how to choose who in the population will fill the other cryosleep spaces.
Jack's brother's construction company is hired to build out one of the bunkers and to get it ready for the 200 years it needs to survive, so the human population doesn't go extinct. In payment, everyone that's working to get the bunker ready has been promised a cryosleep bed and will survive the comet. Jack and Kyle had a hard upbringing because of their parents dying, and Jack is seen as coming from a hard background.
I really enjoyed reading the chapters from both Charlotte and Jack. I liked Charlotte and I could see how guilty she felt for being promised a cryosleep chamber, but she wanted to survive, so she's trying to do everything she can to feel she earned her place in the future. And perhaps to stop feeling so guilty. She idolises her grandfather, she can see his vision of a peaceful future. Though she's not exactly sure how a world without weapons could actually work, all the post apocalyptic films prove that humanity is only in it for themselves, for self-preservation.
Jack is a hard worker, sure he has a temper, and he doesn't have a filter, but he believes that if you work hard enough then you should get what you're owed or promised. A little naïve perhaps, but you can see how badly he wants things to go right, the hope he has. He and Charlotte meet in one of the bunkers when her grandfather insists she stays there while he goes to the other bunkers across the country to check out the program. Charlotte is determined to make herself useful, so she and Jack are put together to clear out rooms of supplies that should not be needed in the future, i.e weapons and guns. Jack hates her at first because she's the granddaughter of the head of BRP who may have lied about how many cryosleep chambers would be ready. But how can he not fall for the prettiest girl he's ever seen?
Overall, I really enjoyed reading this story, I was sucked in and wanted to see how this particular bunker ended up the way it did. I found the messages quite interesting in this story. Charlotte is flawed, she so badly wants to help, and she thinks everyone should have a say, that things should fair. Spoiler: While I found this quite endearing, it was also very ironic how this was the first thing to go when she wasn't getting what she wanted. As soon as things didn't go the way she wanted it to, she ended up using her privilege anyway and her grandfathers money to change things. Which contradicted everything she had done till that point. This scene was so interesting, and made her very human. People use their privilege to their advantage all the time, no matter if they try really hard not to. When the worse case scenario happens, they will do anything they can to make it better. I didn't dislike Charlotte for this, and I felt like it grounded her.
What was interesting about reading this story was that as we had already read the first book, we already knew how the world had turned out after the comet, so the suspense wasn't waiting to find out how this bunker might survive the apocalypse. But actually it was focused on the characters, the decisions made in the beginning, filling in the gaps of the program and how things turned out the way they did. The character arcs were interesting and a little surprising.
I devoured Meet me at the world's end, I was awake till really late yet again. I just couldn't put this book down. I'm very excited to read the final book, where the characters we met in the first book and this book meet. Not only that, but I also can't wait to find out more information about how the world has changed since the comet hit.