JUNAH AT THE END OF THE WORLD

Anticipating the destruction of life, 12-year-old Junah Simmons attempts to immortalize his world.

It’s September 1999, and Y2K is on the horizon. On Junah’s first day of sixth grade, his teacher, Miss Meechum, assigns an unusual project: Fill a shoebox “with things that tell what it was like to be alive in Carolina at the end of the world. Your capsule will tell your story.” This is the perfect assignment for precocious Junah. The boy—who is smaller than his classmates, has a speech impediment, and wears sunglasses everywhere—spends his life observing and collecting. His only problem with this assignment is that one shoe box clearly will not be enough, and as the weeks leading up to the putative end of time approach, he gathers more and more boxes to fill. Junah gets bullied, debates accepting Jesus into his heart, stumbles upon death, longs for a more complete family, swallows his pet goldfish, and falls in love. Each of these moments is memorialized and placed into a box as Junah speaks directly to a future “you” who has survived the apocalypse. Junah’s voice is at once wry and hopeful, every vignette more compelling than the last. And while the novel itself is firmly situated in the months leading up to the 21st century, Leach manages to unstick the story from the bounds of a calendar to become something far more prescient.

A timely eulogy for anyone who fears the end of the world as they know it.