Away We Go

by Emil Ostrovski

Overview

“Funny, heart-wrenching, and wickedly smart, Away We Go is everything I love best about Emil Ostrovski's writing. This is a great novel!”—Andrew Smith, Printz Honor–winning author of Grasshopper Jungle

With an innovative format that includes interstitial documents, such as flyers, postcards, and handwritten notes, Away We Go is an often funny, honest look at the struggles of first love and tragic heartbreak that will resonate with fans of the critically acclaimed Grasshopper Jungle, by Andrew Smith, and Noggin, by John Corey Whaley.

Westing is not your typical school. For starters, you have to have one very important quality in order to be admitted—you have to be dying. Every student at Westing has been diagnosed with PPV, or the Peter Pan Virus, and no one is expected to live to graduation. What do you do when you go to a high school where no one has a future or any clue how to find meaning in their remaining days?

From the author of the acclaimed The Paradox of Vertical Flight, an Indie Next Pick.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062238573
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	01/17/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	277
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Emil Ostrovski emigrated from Russia when he was two years old. He graduated from Vassar College in 2012 with a degree in philosophy and currently attends the MFA program in creative writing at Columbia University. The Paradox of Vertical Flight is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

A lyrical, raucous narrative interspersed with flyers, posters, and letters…the oscillation between [Noah’s] heartfelt interior thoughts and sometimes careless actions and words is both moving and infuriating-in other words, vividly human. An intelligent, thought-provoking exploration of living in spite of futility.” — Booklist (starred review)

“Intellectual boys’ boarding school story meets near-future dystopia in this end-times tale. …Noah and his friends form loving, believably complex relationships…witty.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Noah is a nihilistic existentialist to the world, but inside he’s searching for something to reassure him that he is truly alive. His search for meaning is universal and will resonate with readers beginning to question their future.” — School Library Journal

“The complex organization of this novel requires careful attention…Even so, brainy readers who want to see just how grim Holden Caulfield would get if he knew he was dying soon will find this to be a pretty accurate approximation.” — Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

From the Publisher

The complex organization of this novel requires careful attention…Even so, brainy readers who want to see just how grim Holden Caulfield would get if he knew he was dying soon will find this to be a pretty accurate approximation.

Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

A lyrical, raucous narrative interspersed with flyers, posters, and letters…the oscillation between [Noah’s] heartfelt interior thoughts and sometimes careless actions and words is both moving and infuriating-in other words, vividly human. An intelligent, thought-provoking exploration of living in spite of futility.

Booklist (starred review)

The complex organization of this novel requires careful attention…Even so, brainy readers who want to see just how grim Holden Caulfield would get if he knew he was dying soon will find this to be a pretty accurate approximation.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

12/01/2015
Gr 10 Up—In the future, children and young adults are contracting the Peter Pan Virus by the hundreds and thousands. The disease is airborne, and to protect the population, infected youths are sequestered in recovery centers and clinics. Noah Falls has just been transferred to the Ivy League of recovery centers, Westing Academy. Away from parents and his boyfriend, he pins his affections on a boy who doesn't reciprocate, tarnishing his other relationships and increasing his feelings of self-loathing. Surrounded by people who love him, Noah is miserably alone. The emphasis in this work is not on the dystopian future disease but on character development and philosophical questions about life, death, and meaning. Noah is a nihilistic existentialist to the world, but inside he's searching for something to reassure him that he is truly alive. His search for meaning is universal and will resonate with readers beginning to question their future. VERDICT The complexity of the writing and underlying themes, as well as the language and sexual situations, makes this best suited to mature readers.—Heather Miller Cover, Homewood Public Library, AL

School Library Journal

2015-11-03
Intellectual boys' boarding school story meets near-future dystopia in this end-times tale. Like the other 600,000 American children and teenagers with Peter Pan Virus, Noah attends a school—of sorts. The "recovery centers" are a cross between internment camps and underfunded classrooms. They're badly misnamed, as well, as nearly all PPV sufferers die in adolescence. Blocked from phone calls, the Internet, and outside contact, Noah finds solace in banter and existential despair, hiding in the toilet stall-turned-library that's the best his recovery center offers. When he transfers to Westing, the sole prep school for PPV kids, Noah finds an idyllic New England haven where students read Whitman while seeking their inner Michelangelo or Sappho. The students, however, are just the same as everywhere else: dying teenagers. Noah nurses his alcoholism tenderly while exchanging droll repartee with the object of his affection. No, not with his girlfriend, Alice, but with Zach, the extremely ill and, predictably, straight boy with whom Noah's enjoyed several tender hookups. Meanwhile, a meteor's headed for Earth. Thin worldbuilding and confusing time shifts detract only slightly; the imminent apocalypse serves primarily to accelerate the claustrophobic immediacy of boarding school angst. Noah and his friends form loving, believably complex relationships, caroming from suicidal ideation to conspiracy theory to a quest for the sacred in mundane death. Lovers of self-consciously witty nihilist profundities will be thrilled; alas that the snark is mired in the stale trope of tragic gay romance. (Dystopia. 14-17)

Kirkus Reviews