End of the World House by Adrienne Celt

​    I didn’t realize this right away, but this wasn’t a first celt read for me. I’ve read her Invitation to the Bonfire some time ago and liked it, mostly. I’ve just revisited my review of it and the phrase that stood out was that it had a nice twist but it took you down the WTF road to get there. Because that is very much the case with this book also.
    This is a story of friendship, first and foremost. A sort of dedicated female friendship that evolves or devolves over time, a sort of thing that potentially I’d label and dismiss as women’s fiction. But it is set in a mildly apocalyptic world and had time loops in it. Now that’s interesting.
     If you’re wondering what constitutes a mild apocalypse…well, it’s the one that sort of fades to the background. Most apocalyptic stories feature it front and center, but in this book it’s merely a stage setting. There are expositions that are not attributed to anyone, there are climate change based disasters, but overall majority of lives remain unaffected or at least there is still a consistent semblance of the world as we know it.
     And in this world two best friends, Bertie and Kate, decide to do it up and go to Paris, where Kate promptly disappears in the Louvre and Bertie finds herself groundhogging the same day over and over. 
     It takes a while for her and for the readers to figure out what’s going on, by which time the book takes a decidedly romantic turn. But it’s all connected, in a trippy and loopy (literally) way and it’ll all be understood in the end. 
     So definitely an interesting and origjnal plot. The execution…well, it was pretty good too. I didn’t love it, to be honest, for two main reasons…a. the plot was too precociously trippy as if enamored with its own weirdness and b. I didn’t really connect with the characters. I’m not sure if they were too girly for me or too millennial or just not interesting enough, but there it is. Something that’ll probably vary for different readers, but reading is personal like that.
    It was a pretty fun read, I was entertained, the writing itself was very good, the plot had cleverness about it, so the overall result is much the same as my previous book by the author, somewhere inbetween. Thanks Netgalley.