We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson

                                              🌟🌟🌟🌟 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Synopsis:
Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.

Only he isn’t sure he wants to.

After all, life hasn’t been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer’s. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend’s suicide last year.

Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.

But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it…or let the world—and his pain—be destroyed forever.

This book was unlike any of the books that I have read before in this genre. I was impressed with the author's ability to combine a science fiction element with a realistic story line of a boy who is grieving the loss of his boyfriend as well as having to deal with a myriad of other issues in his life. The author managed to do this without having the story suffer and made it all seem realistic. I don't think anyone has ever been abducted in real life but I believed that Henry had been. I believe that it was the realism that truly made me enjoy this story along with the depth of character and the thought provoking plot.

I thought that the questions that this book presented were interesting. Is the Earth and the people that reside on it worth saving? What value do you place on your life? I also thought that the ideas that Henry had for how the world would end if he didn't push the button were intriguing. They helped to cut through the angst that the book presented. It was difficult at times to read what Henry was faced with because the author of the book seemed to throw everything at him. I'm not sure if Shaun David Hutchinson likes to torture his characters but he tortured Henry. I have to say that every trial that Henry went through made sense and wasn't just thrown in so that the author could move the story along.

The only aspect of the book that I found issue with was the length of the book. It seemed like it was a bit drawn out and I couldn't help thinking of the Japanese cartoons wherein it takes five or six episodes for five seconds to go by. I'm not sure if I would have shortened the book though. I wouldn't want to take away from the depth that the author was able to achieve over the course of the book.