4.5 Stars... Really liked it, but thought Glory was a little bit high and mighty at times. PS- how does A.S. King come up with this stuff... Petrified bats and visions of the entire universe?? So cool!


Glory is about to graduate high school... and she has no plans. The future to Glory is one big question mark. Will she even have a future?? Her mother committed suicide when she was in preschool, and she can't help but wonder if that's where she's headed too. She's not suicidal, but the similarities between her and Darla are too much to ignore. Her best and only friend Ellie lives on a commune next door, and Glory kind of can't wait to be free of her. Then one night something magical happens... Ellie and Glory wake up being able to see the history of the world, past and future. As far back as the Big Bang and forward to infinity. What Glory sees is overwhelming, and not in a good way. Does she really want to live in a world where this is what she has to look forward to?

My Thoughts:
It's for real guys.... A.S. King is a creative genius. She made up a story about a girl who drinks a petrified bat and sees where people come from and where they will go. She also made up a future world where women will have their rights stripped away, and 2nd Civil War will ensue, and a new terrifying leader will emerge. And somehow she connects all this together to make it MEAN something. I can't appreciate what she did with this enough.

Having said that, this isn't a book I loved to death. Usually I like reading about the loner-types, but Glory's form of self-chosen isolation didn't sit well with me. It was like she thought she was better than everybody else. And the way she treated her best friend was just wrong. I wanted to shake her and say, "If you don't like the girl, don't hang out with her". Every time Ellie would say ANYTHING about herself or her issues, Glory would make comments about how selfish she was. So okay, maybe SOME of those times Ellie was making it all about her, but some of the time it is about HER. That's friendship. It's about you, it's about them, and both of you together. Deep down I felt like the problem wasn't Ellie, it was that Glory was riding on her high horse.

I absolutely LOVED reading the transmissions Glory would get when she looked at people. It was so interesting to find out that someone's distant relative will live on Jupiter... or someone's great-great-grandmother was apart of the Underground Railroad. It reminded me a lot of the passengers stories in Ask the Passengers, which was my favorite part of that book.

Feminism was a main theme in this book. I really liked some of it... but some of it was just too much for me. For instance, I don't need to be made to feel bad because I like to wear makeup and look nice. Or even sexy. If it makes me feel good, then it's my prerogative. I liked that it addressed how women are marketed to and how that affects our perception of ourselves. I liked that it told a story of the worth of women as more than just sex objects. But Glory was pretty judgmental about people who just wanted to be well groomed.

So complaints aside, I really liked the book. It's so freaking unique and creative and it totally changed my view of what a YA book can be. It can be anything!! If there's anything I would change it would be to breathe a little more life into Glory. She lacked life and passion, which I think was intentional since she was carrying around all that baggage from her mother. But drinking the bat and seeing all the bad that was to come sort of made her more depressed, not less. And I wanted her to come to life more than she did.

This book is not going to be for everyone... but I still think everyone should read it. It shows that YA is more than just swooney romances and paranormal fantasy stuff.

Quotes: "Free yourself, have the courage" "I am no one special. You are no one special. Most people can't handle it."

OVERALL: A truly unique book in a sea of ordinary. Glory O'Brien is about to tell you the history of the world, past and present... and you will probably not like what you are going to hear. I had issues with the way the main character judged people and isolated herself, but the story and the awesomeness of the writing more than made up for those things. Everyone should give this one a shot.

My Blog:
( )

Listened to the Audiobook. It was excellent! Glory is a riveting character spending a week of her life trying to figure out who she is and if she will end up like her mother. ( )

A star rating doesn't really work for this book. I would prefer to rate it with a huge question mark. I loved A.S. King's writing as always, and I love the characters that she creates. I was a little unsure about the plot, though. It could be that I am just chilled by the scary topics that she takes on, or it could be that I expected more bulk to the story. For something called the History of the Future, it's not a very long book! However, I find it lingering in my mind, and it might be something that I appreciate more after a little time. ( )

Glory drinks a petrified bat. Afterward, she sees the future (and the past) of each person she looks at.

I wasn't sure whether I was liking this book or not as I was reading it, but I could not stop reading it. If you like strange, but fascinating, books with fully developed characters, you might like this one. If strange is not your taste, you probably won't like it.

I've decided I loved it. ( )

(irritably) Oh look. My third one-star rating in a row as of recently. Spoilers if you can call them that.
Back in 2016 when I first joined Goodreads, this popped up on my feed as a recommendation. I'd read it the year prior, and rated it three stars because I hadn't found it particularly memorable. Now, it was in someone else's feed, and I decided to read it six years from the original date. Buckle up: this is gonna be a harsh review with a string of trigger warnings.
TW: Suicide of a parent, possible cheating, animal cruelty depending on how you look at it, misogyny, sexism, adult women preying on a man who's barely twenty-one, fatphobia, allusions to a future dystopia.

If you are someone who survived the suicide of a parent, I am so sorry for what you're experiencing. I can't imagine it. Stay away from this book. Suicide is not at all treated with the seriousness it deserves--the author uses it as padding to increase word count. Glory treats her mother's suicide with maximum wangst and was remarkably self-centered about it. Since Glory's mom is never characterized deeply and nobody talks about her, her suicide and the aftermath carry the emotional weight of a feather. I have no idea when her mother actually died. Okay, I just looked it up: Glory's mom died when she was four. She's behaving like it happened a year ago, only with wangst. She -cannot- at any point, seem to SHUT UP about the fact that her mom stuck her head in the oven and how twagic it is. I GOT IT THE FIRST TIME. Tell me more, not the same thing over and over! SHOW me how hard it is to grow up without a mom. SHOW me your relationship to your dad. SHOW me anything. Glory, have you seriously been going on like this for thirteen whole years? And you've never seen a guidance counselor or anything? Oh, and she makes a reference to Shoah. The author never, ever tells me why I should care. Everyone in this book is incredibly poorly characterized.

Darla, Glory's deceased mom, and she love photography. Or so it's stated. Photographers either one of them likes are never mentioned. Techniques aren't, either. Nor is where the love of it comes from, goals either had around photography (eg win an award, go to school for photojournalism, art school), favorite photos...instead it's just a deluge of depressed people's thoughts. Glory actually does love to call her best friend a slut repeatedly and feel sorry for herself about everything ever. Apparently this is supposed to indicate Glory's depression. Show me her relationship to: food, hygiene, studies, friends, relationships, activities she used to like--and then show me she's pulling away. Show me she's trying to figure out what's going on, or, you know, her dad being concerned! The author does none of that. But I got to read several times about how slutty Glory found her supposed BFF Ellie. See, Ellie slept with a guy for the first time OMG. OMG, and he's the guy she's been dating ISN'T THAT AWFUL? Sleeping with your own BOYFRIEND. She got pubic lice, OMG TOTES EWWW. Ellie asks Glory to get her some shampoo for it, and she does, by cracking a cruel joke to the pharmacists at Ellie's expense. It involved the term "slutty friend." And the pharmacists laughed. They are terrible people, unless it was shocked laughter at this little shit. It occurs to me that Glory O'Brien is Bella Swan, only from Pennsylvania in 2014, but she doesn't have a crush on anyone and there's no vampires.

Ellie and Glory are not best friends for any solid reason besides living across the uh, barn path? I'm a city slicker and genuinely mean the question. I'm not sure how to describe it. Anyway, they live across from one another and are the same age. Ellie and Glory put a dead bat in beer and drank it at the beginning of the book. They started seeing everyone's distant pasts and futures. Mostly those people's relatives and where they came from, and what they would go on to achieve. Ellie sees everyone's pasts. This could have been a great opportunity to have her "see" Glory's mom and they could a build a bond and get closure, but no. The author was too invested in having Ellie get pubic lice.

Glory is stated to have only one friend, Ellie. But she's a member of yearbook club at school, and an amateur photographer. And -none- of the kids have tried to be friendly? It's probably because she's so horrible.

Entire passages were repeated nearly verbatim throughout the book. Ellie's boyfriend is being preyed upon by two adult women, each of which has a child by him. Glory does not tell any responsible adult this. Instead, she uses this information to taunt Ellie. It's 2014. Get a paternity test! Tell someone! And somehow, it's a cult that Ellie lives at, since she's homeschooled? What? And her mother runs the cult? And it's on land that belongs to Glory? AUTHOR, STOP. The author did not stop.

Glory's dad never talks about his wife, either. He never shares happy memories of the mom. Never remarks on what got them together, inside jokes, annual rituals...he's not even an involved father. No, his only purpose is to be fat, lazy and poor until Glory's graduation. If he makes an attempt to get to know Glory, it doesn't show. At her graduation, he hands her a 50K check casually. Glory moseys over to a bank and sticks it into an account. Without a parent present. At the age of seventeen. In 2014. In America. THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN. Anything above 10K would launch an immediate investigation and a parent would absolutely have to be present to help fill out IRS form 8300. Glory gets another 10K because I don't care and I hate this book.

She and her dad try to get the farm away from Ellie and her mom because Glory's mom...owned it, and something about naked pictures of Ellie's mom, with whom she was best friends. Ellie's mom sent the pictures to Glory's dad to try to get his attention sexually. He says it didn't work, and then that he gave them to his own wife? And she saved them in her darkroom? What the fuck.

Interspersed with the ever-increasing and increasingly ridiculous subplots is Glory's visions of a future dystopia. She's totes gonna save the day and her husband will die in her arms when they're ninety, guys. This reads like a long, stunningly bland and repetitive fever dream the author had, combined with her lashing out at a mean girl from her past. Why she wrote this is beyond me. And her publication team and editor: what were they -smoking-? Did A.S. King even have an editor? This book was awful. ( )