Everything You Need to Survive the Apocalypse by Lucas Klauss

Published by Simon Pulse on January 3, 2012

For the sake of a pretty girl, the “vaguely atheist” Phillip Flowers finds himself attending a Wednesday night church youth group.  Phillip is a high school kid filled with the usual teen angst.  He hates the track team’s assistant coach and thinks his two best friends have betrayed him by quitting the team.  Rebekah is Phillip’s newest obsession, an improvement over his usual worries about the many possible sources of the planet’s destruction.  Not that Rebekah is much help in that regard:  she turns him onto the Book of Revelation, giving Phillip even more apocalyptic scenarios to fret about.

Rebekah’s evangelical Christian father would be angry if he knew that Rebekah favored Phillip while Phillip’s devoutly atheistic father becomes apoplectic when he learns that Phillip has been attending an evangelical youth group.  Can puppy love blossom when the big dogs are determined to keep their kids apart?  Or will Phillip allow himself to be converted to a new belief system because that’s the way to a young girl’s heart?

Just as troubling for Phillip is his friend Mark’s new allegiance to two kids who regard Phillip as something of a twerp (Phillip’s other best friend, Asher, is having girl problems of his own and may, in fact, have his eye on Rebekah).  To top off his list of troubles, Phillip is having difficulty coming to terms with the loss of his mother, and it doesn’t help that he’s continually embarrassed by his father.

There’s a not-so-hidden message in this book:  that nonbelievers can be just as annoying as believers when they attempt to convert others to their inflexible ways of thinking.  At times, in fact, as when Phillip announces that he “wants a real relationship with God,” I was wondering whether this YA novel is Christian lit sneakily disguised as mainstream comedy.  Fortunately, the novel isn’t that simplistic.  When Phillip has a crisis of faith -- when he realizes he has none, not even in himself -- he discovers that his evangelical girlfriend has problems of her own, despite her devout faith.  He eventually wonders whether people who claim to know the Truth have any more insight into the Truth than anyone else.  Ultimately, Everything You Need to Survive the Apocalypse is a coming of age story with a twist:  coming of age for Phillip means accepting the fact that he doesn’t have -- that nobody has -- all the answers.

Lucas Klauss writes easy, breezy prose that makes the novel a quick read.  I love the dialog.  Klauss perfectly captures the attitude and language of high school kids.  His adult characters are less convincing.  The assistant track coach, in particular, I didn’t buy at all:  his actions and motivations are unconvincing.  My only other gripe is that Phillip’s relationship with his mother is developed in a series of flashbacks that are interspersed with the rest of the story, a technique I found distracting.  In fact, the subplot involving Phillip’s mother is so cheesy that it detracts from the main story.

For the most part, however, the novel is funny, entertaining, and moderately insightful.  It neither bashes nor endorses religion; it simply tells an amusing story about religion’s impact on different people, and on a young man’s struggle to understand it all, and to understand himself.  I guardedly recommend it for those reasons.

RECOMMENDED