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Vivian Apple at the End of the World is a breezy apocalyptic read that I appreciated, but came up short of loving. Published in 2014, the novel focuses on a model seventeen-year-old who not only watches freakish weather and economic recession rampage across the U.S., but witnesses the rise of the Church of America, whose half-baked gospels instruct an alarming number of Believers how to be raptured into heaven on Judgment Day, while all others will be set on the road to damnation. When her parents appear to be taken up by God and the apocalypse is at hand, she's left to fend for herself. The author succeeds at hitting all the right notes, but the tune itself never grabbed me.

Opening in Pittsburgh (in a refreshing change of pace from cities glamorized on TV), honors student Vivian Apple is introduced at a party thrown by her best friend of late, the wild Harpreet Janda. The girls have been become inseparable Non-Believers as one calamity after another--an earthquake in Chicago, a terrorist bombing at a Yankees game, the extinction of the U.S. bee population--have led to the rise of Beaton Frick, a wingnut from (where else?) Florida who claims to have spoken to Jesus at Starbuck's. Frick's business scheme, the Church of America, has grown massively popular as national crisis deepens, hopelessness surges and its forecast for Rapture Day grows nigh.

While Vivian and Harp have rejected the Book of Frick and the Believer parents who've attempted to convert them, the party host implores her friend to live like the world is ending and chat up a cute boy. Quiet and intense, Peter Ivey is in the mood for a conversation, which Vivian is sure she's failed at when he excuses himself. Vivian's social ineptitude is nothing compared to her shock the next morning to find that her parents have disappeared, leaving behind two holes in the ceiling. She's joined by Harp and her brother Raj, Raj's boyfriend Dylan and Dylan's seven-year-old sister Molly, all apparently orphaned after roughly three thousand Believers in the U.S. vanish at once.

I help make Molly a fort out of couch cushions and pillows; I throw open the kitchen cabinets and laugh when my friends' mouths fall open at my hoard. The food is all Church of America brand; in addition to founding the Church itself, Frick was the CEO of its accompanying multi-million dollar corporation. They publish the magazines and run the Church television networks, and they produce end-of-the-world provisions like these--bottles of Holy Spring Water, a bland SpaghettiOs knockoff called Christ Loops. For a long time I took a moral stand by not consuming them but now the Rapture has come and I'm starving. We eat cold Christ Loops out of the can, even though the electricity still works, for now.

Though her high school has been mostly empty her junior year (public education derided by the Church of America as "harbingers of secular terrorism"), Vivian walks to class on Monday with a sledgehammer over her shoulder for self-defense. Remaining students have filled the classroom of her history teacher Ms. Wambaugh, but the last adult in Vivian's world and her peers offer little more than progressive platitudes for rebuilding society with no plan of action. Harp always has a plan but before the girls can formulate one, Vivian's sophisticated maternal grandparents arrive to take custody and return with her to New York.

In the Big Apple, Vivian is quarantined in her grandparents' apartment in Central Park West. Electricity is out, the university where her grandfather teaches has been closed and on the streets, a youth movement calling itself the New Orphans rails against Frick. Her grandparents remain in denial but as a massive hurricane heads for the Eastern Seaboard, Vivian decides to steal their car and return to Pittsburgh. Before she initiates her first act of rebellion, the house phone rings in from a caller in San Francisco. No one speaks when Vivian answers, but she is left with the feeling that her mother was on the other end of the line.

Vivian ventures to Lawrenceville where Raj and Dylan lived to find Harp, drunk. She reports that a mob of young men lured Raj and Dylan to a football field, shot Raj and returned his body for them to bury. Dylan took Molly to New Jersey while Harp remained to be scorned by a second wave of Believers who feel their entrance to heaven hinges on punishing the sinners. Harp has contacts in the New Orphans and takes Vivian to meet their communications director, Peter Ivey, the boy who Vivian embarrassed herself with at the Rapture Eve party. Vivian shares her California phone call and Peter reveals that Frick might have a secret compound there, where the "Raptured" could be hiding. Vivian, Harp and Peter hit the road to find out. Their first stop is the holy site of Mount Rushmore.

The Book of Frick claims that in the late 1970s Jesus personally appeared to Frick in a powder-blue Chrysler convertible that had the power to travel instantly through space and time. Jesus used the vehicle to usher Frick to seven different spots in the United States that were personally blessed by God for one reason or another and at which Believers and Non-Believers alike could expect to find redemption. The list includes everywhere you'd think it would: the Grand Canyon, the Pentagon, Wall Street ("For God saw that Americans were industrious and made money in His name, and he saw that it was good.") It's one of the many parts of the Book of Frick that make you wonder whether or not Frick was just straight-up on 'shrooms when he was writing it; make that accusation to a Believer, however, as I did to my parents in their mission to convert me, and they will whine that "it's only a metaphor!" and imply that your inability to grasp nuance is a large part of what ensures your eternal damnation.

Katie Coyle strikes a clinically precise balance between lighter and darker elements in Vivian Apple at the End of the World. Her frequent references to the Book of Frick are droll, but her exploration of how religious gospels interpreted at their most literal extreme are the antithesis of humanity are potent. There is violence and terror in the story, but they remain mostly in the background rather than imperiling the characters. The same could be said of the novel's sex, drug and alcohol content, which Coyle suggests that Harp partakes in and does exist in the world of her teenagers without being described graphically.

Coyle recognizes that readers of Young Adult fiction tend to be open to the truth and the author takes advantage of it. Her running satire on the cult-like aspects of a religion are admirable, as well as very creative. She even creates new vocabulary words: "Magadalene" being parlance for the indoctrination of a Non-Believer female by a wholesome Believer male, with Harp considered vulnerable to considering her fetish for clean-cut boys. The writing is creative and the characters endearing, but it never grabbed me by the collar and threw me across the room the way a great apocalyptic novel would. It hits all the right notes as a satire, but I didn't believe it.

What kept me from being engaged with the doomsday scenario Coyle conjures up are the pages that lapse into melodrama. Vivian has at least one heart to heart meltdown with each character and each of those characters has an emotional breakdown with Vivian or someone else, grinding the story to a halt while people talk it out. There's too much talking about the end rather than showing how the characters plan to survive it. Theatrics are a recurring feature of this genre but it's one that holds the novel between three or four stars rather than between four or five. It's a very well written novel, but one I thought more about that felt.