At 16, Denise is used to difficulty. She's from a mixed-race family in Amsterdam, and she's on the autism spectrum. But now a comet is heading for Earth, and she knows she has far worse to get through. Her family is assigned to a shelter, but Denise's sister Iris is missing, and her drug-addicted mother can't even handle the basics when the world is not ending.
Corinne Duyvis (Otherbound), autistic and an Amsterdammer herself, has created a nuanced, compassionate character in Denise. She also imagines a believably devastated 2035--survivors stay connected through fading portable wrist tabs as they scavenge the flooded city under dust-storm skies. The author's real achievement, however, is in layering the inevitable dilemmas: If you can't save everyone, where do you draw the line? Denise stumbles upon a ship that's preparing for a multi-generation voyage to colonize another planet, but everyone must prove his or her usefulness to earn a spot on board, and she knows her mother is her biggest liability.
As Denise desperately works to join the ship, and searches for Iris, she pushes herself in ways she never thought she could. She isn't good at interpreting facial expressions, and her memorized social responses don't always work. Still, she keeps trying to connect and move forward. Denise says, "I don't think I'm built for the end of the world," but if she makes it, the end of the world may mean a new way of seeing herself.
On the Edge of Gone is an exciting read that packs in some deep thinking and real moral wallops along the way. --Ali Davis, freelance writer and playwright