Armageddon Summer(4/5)

Armageddon Summer is a novel written by Jane Yolen and Bruce Coville. This novel is fiction based on true life stories of cults from around the US. Armageddon Summer is mainly about two teenagers Marina and Jed, whose parents have become believers. Believers are what members of the cult name themselves. The believers believe that the world will burn to the ground and that their only chance for survival is to join Reverend Beelson the leader of the believers on a mountain retreat where they will prepare for what happens after the Armageddon or apocalypse. What I enjoy most about this book is the way it was organized. The chapters are divided based on whose perspective we are seeing Marina or Jed, and to help us have a full version of what is going on we get letters, radio scripts, and speeches made by the cult leader. I would recommend this book to anyone who is fascinated by cults or how they specifically affect the lives of kids that were dragged into them by their family members. This novel is a really fast read and I enjoyed reading it. I would not recommend this book to anyone who is not interested in cults or romance as the building relationship between Marina and Jed throughout the book is one of the main plots of the story. In the novel, we mostly see from the perspective of teenagers and the issues are mostly focused around them meaning that we don’t get to learn much about the other characters in the novel. I wished that we had learned more about Reverend Beelson, we do learn a bit about his son but nothing specific about himself. This novel is fiction based on true life stories of cults from around the US. This is a hard book to pinpoint one single theme for. I would say that the main message is that God is not needed to cause the end of the world, we are completely capable of doing it by ourselves. In conclusion, I enjoyed this book. I enjoyed seeing how the plot unfolds, and the organization of the chapters. I only wish we had learned more about the leader and more about the plan he was gonna carry out after Armageddon.