It\u2019s September 1999, and Y2K is on the horizon. On Junah\u2019s first day of sixth grade, his teacher, Miss Meechum, assigns an unusual project: Fill a shoebox \u201cwith things that tell what it was like to be alive in Carolina at the end of the world. Your capsule will tell your story.\u201d This is the perfect assignment for precocious Junah. The boy\u2014who is smaller than his classmates, has a speech impediment, and wears sunglasses everywhere\u2014spends his life observing and collecting. His only problem with this assignment is that one shoe box clearly will not be enough, and as the weeks leading up to the putative end of time approach, he gathers more and more boxes to fill. Junah gets bullied, debates accepting Jesus into his heart, stumbles upon death, longs for a more complete family, swallows his pet goldfish, and falls in love. Each of these moments is memorialized and placed into a box as Junah speaks directly to a future \u201cyou\u201d who has survived the apocalypse. Junah\u2019s voice is at once wry and hopeful, every vignette more compelling than the last. And while the novel itself is firmly situated in the months leading up to the 21st century, Leach manages to unstick the story from the bounds of a calendar to become something far more prescient.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s September 1999, and Y2K is on the horizon. On Junah\u2019s first day of sixth grade, his teacher, Miss Meechum, assigns an unusual project: Fill a shoebox \u201cwith things that tell what it was like to be alive in Carolina at the end of the world. Your capsule will tell your story.\u201d This is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3259,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3258"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}