How To Build a Home for the End of the World

by Keely Shinners

In the midst of widespread drought, the Sorensens have been relatively sheltered in their hometown of Fox Lake, Illinois. But, when all the water in their lake disappears overnight, family bonds begin to unravel. Seventeen-year-old Mary-Beth, hell-bent on saving the girl she loves, convinces her father, Donny, to go on a road trip to California. Along the way, they meet inventors and academics, ancestors and desert healers, angels and ghosts, all while reckoning with the faultlines of their past to imagine a better future, a remade home in the world.

Framed as a case history of post-apocalyptic times, How To Build a Home for the End of the World considers how people negotiate care in the throes of ever-unfolding crisis.

Paperback

Published May 1, 2022

Reviews

[Seraphina · Rating 5 out of 5]

How to Build a Home for the End of the World navigates the desire for connection, sense of belonging and the importance of love in a post-apocalyptic world with tender clarity. The search for a home within ourselves and with loved ones in times of crisis is vulnerable and emotive, creating magnified moments of hope and joy.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOLY FUCK. Okay, this book. You need to read it. It’s April and I’m calling it - definitely one of my top 5 this year. I was lucky enough to receive an ARC and plan to do an interview with the author. For now, I implore you to pre-order/purchase this incredible novel. It does so much brutal, affecting, and transformational work — both as a text and within the text — that my head is spinning.

[Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book for our times, a book for the times before us and after us—a book that comforts, offers new definitions for home.

[cailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful, heartbreaking, profound….wow

[Ben Albertyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh Donny… Can’t stop thinking about Donny. In more than one way, Donny’s character stuck to me like putty. He is an extraordinary creation. First of all he is funny in the truest most profound sense. I was reminded of Todd McGowan’s theory of comedy, which says that comedy is the point at which excess and lack converge. Donny sits squarely over that nexus point, with his legs spread out like a little boy in his own world. Maybe the most impressive manoeuvre that the author pulls off here is to successfully bring him back from the brink. Not the brink that Mary-Beth finds him at, the brink physical death, but the brink that the reader finds him at, the brink of symbolic death. The brink of complete, ruinous humiliation and psychosis. I almost thought Shinners had done too much to him too early on, but she manages to not so much redeem him as successfully reintegrate him into the world of the novel. Which is what How to Build a Home is ultimately about. It is about how even when things fall apart entirely, even when it feels most appropriate to abandon the public in favour of the private survival mode that dystopian novels usually favour, we need to be hauled back into the symbolic. There is no triumph of the human spirit to be found here, but there is an insistence on the public, on a space of shared meaning making, on true love, without which there is no human spirit to begin with. And I think this is an important move for dystopian fiction in general. Not to reimagine the end of the world in terms of moral goodness, which Shinners carefully circumvents, but rather to foreground the thankless slog of remaining sane amidst societal collapse.

What really gets under your skin about this novel though, what remains difficult to shake after its done, is the way it renders the relationship between love and decay. This book is incredibly romantic, as romantic as it is gory (I think of that great moment when “an eye flew out of its socket on a long pink string”). Romance and gore go hand in hand here. As the world and our bodies fall apart we will love each other and the world more and more desperately. Which is an important insight, one worth insisting upon. Love is not a response to beauty or perfection, it means “to give what one doesn’t have,” to borrow Lacan’s lovely construction. How to Build a Home proves this point by virtue of being a love story set in a world where there is literally, physically, nothing more to give.

[Sam Villaluz · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Having lived in California my entire life, I knew that stale air meant heat, and heat meant wind, and wind meant we were on the verge of fire." this books gives me hope. it is about caring for one another, in a world where no one has anything to give anymore. officially a big fan of perennial press / keely shinners <3

[Melissa Boles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is unexpected in all the best ways. I understood Mary-Beth and loved her journey so much, and came to idolize Ida in some of the same ways she did. It’s such a powerful commentary on found family, home, and what we do for those we love.

[Libby Reyff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous and heartbreaking, just like the End of the World.

[Addison Blanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a WILD RIDE. For fans of true adventure, this book has that and so so so much more. A great road trip full of twists and turns and beautifully wrought characters, an ode to growing up and surviving, post-apocalyptic americana and an examination of how we collectively can build something new out of the ashes of capitalism. I can’t emphasize just how much this story blew me away and how attached I became to all the characters. If you like Parable of the Sower, Severance by Ling Ma, Station Eleven, The Last of Us- chances are you’ll probably like this this too! 10/10!

[Ezra · Rating 4 out of 5]

an imaginative and well-written book. once i got past the first chapter, i found it incredibly difficult to put down. the one thing holding it back from a 5/5, in my eyes, was that the relationships between characters weren’t very well done. i felt like we were told that characters liked or loved each other, while being shown (via dialogue, actions, etc.) otherwise. in the case of ida and mary-beth’s first interaction, this makes sense in the context of what the story is telling you about mary-beth’s feelings towards ida, but in most other cases just makes for confusion.

[nervousyoungsam · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You can’t just sit there and put everyone’s lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can’t. You have to do things.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

[Fel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read it!!!

[Joshua · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was missing 2 major things: likable characters and world building. Mary-Beth was a stalker psychopath, Donny was a lunatic, and Maria developed memories from pieces of donated liver? Also, a dystopian novel should definitely have more world building instead of just repeating “End of the World” every other page and expecting it to create a vivid image in our heads.

Overall an average read!