We Are the Ants

by Shaun David Hutchinson Narrated by Gibson Frazier

Overview

A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021)

From the “author to watch” (Kirkus Reviews) of The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley comes an “equal parts sarcastic and profound” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) novel about a teenage boy who must decide whether or not the world is worth saving.

Henry Denton has spent years being periodically abducted by aliens. Then the aliens give him an ultimatum: The world will end in 144 days, and all Henry has to do to stop it is push a big red button.

Only he isn't sure he wants to.

After all, life hasn't been great for Henry. His mom is a struggling waitress held together by a thin layer of cigarette smoke. His brother is a jobless dropout who just knocked someone up. His grandmother is slowly losing herself to Alzheimer's. And Henry is still dealing with the grief of his boyfriend's suicide last year.

Wiping the slate clean sounds like a pretty good choice to him.

But Henry is a scientist first, and facing the question thoroughly and logically, he begins to look for pros and cons: in the bully who is his perpetual one-night stand, in the best friend who betrayed him, in the brilliant and mysterious boy who walked into the wrong class. Weighing the pain and the joy that surrounds him, Henry is left with the ultimate choice: push the button and save the planet and everyone on it...or let the world-and his pain-be destroyed forever.

Editorial Reviews

JULY 2016 - AudioFile

Henry has been tasked by aliens to determine if humans deserve to live, but Henry is a teenager who is trying to deal with the suicide of his last boyfriend, the passive-aggressive abuse of his current romance, and a budding relationship with a new classmate. The rest of his life is falling apart as well, so he’s doubtful that humans deserve any future. Narrator Gibson Frazier's youthful projection captures this first-person story well. He delivers tonal shifts that reflect Henry’s emotions as the story progresses and produces realistic voices for the other characters. He also captures Henry’s wry humor as he contemplates what it means to control the fate of the world. L.E. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

★ 12/14/2015
Henry Denton's life is in tatters—he was abandoned by his father; his boyfriend, Jesse, hanged himself; and he is regularly abducted by aliens who have put Earth's very fate in his hands. The 16-year-old, nicknamed "Space Boy" by his tormentors, is self-destructing until he finds a friend in new kid Diego and an ally in Jesse's former pal Audrey. In a style reminiscent of Slaughterhouse-Five, Hutchinson (The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley) intersperses Henry's experience aboard the "slugger" spaceship with his trials on Earth, where he's "a punch line at school, a ghost at home." The extraterrestrial scenes are less the makings of a SF novel than a metaphor for Henry's isolation and alienation from his family and peers, including a gang of bullies who brutally assault him in a shower and then publicly shame him. Hutchinson has crafted an unflinching portrait of the pain and confusion of young love and loss, thoughtfully exploring topics like dementia, abuse, sexuality, and suicide as they entwine with the messy work of growing up. Ages 14–up. Agent: Amy Boggs, Donald Maass Literary Agency. (Jan.)

From the Publisher

2016 Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year

A 2017 ALA Top Ten Rainbow List Title

“A beautiful, masterfully told story by someone who is at the top of his craft.” –Lambda Literary

“Unfailingly dramatic and crackling with characters who become real upon the page.” –Booklist, starred review

“Bitterly funny, with a ray of hope amid bleakness.” –Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Hints of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five... Highly recommended.” –School Library Journal, starred review

“Hutchinson has crafted an unflinching portrait of the pain and confusion of young love and loss.” –Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Wonderfully written... bracingly smart and unusual.” –Shelf Awareness, starred review

STARRED REVIEW Booklist

Hutchinson’s excellent novel of ideas invites readers to wonder about their place in a world that often seems uncaring and meaningless. The novel is never didactic; on the contrary, it is unfailingly dramatic and crackling with characters who become real upon the page. Will Henry press the button? We all await his decision.

School Library Connection

" This title will appeal [...] to everyone who believes human beings' insignificance in the broader scale of the universe is reason enough to cherish all of our fellow ants."

STARRED REVIEW Shelf Awareness

"Shaun David Hutchinson's bracingly smart and unusual YA novel blends existential despair with exploding planets."

Lambda Literary

"[We Are the Ants] is a book about more than love and loss; it’s about struggling to find motivation and not taking the people in your life for granted. A beautiful, masterfully told story by someone who is at the top of his craft."

School Library Journal

12/01/2016
Gr 9 Up—Henry Denton is abducted by aliens who tell him that by merely pushing a button, he can save Earth from annihilation. What seems like an obvious decision becomes a complicated thought process for a teen who has experienced the worst of humanity—bullying, loss, and grief—and who wonders if oblivion is the answer. This strikingly original work will grip readers and force them to ponder tough questions.

JULY 2016 - AudioFile

Henry has been tasked by aliens to determine if humans deserve to live, but Henry is a teenager who is trying to deal with the suicide of his last boyfriend, the passive-aggressive abuse of his current romance, and a budding relationship with a new classmate. The rest of his life is falling apart as well, so he’s doubtful that humans deserve any future. Narrator Gibson Frazier's youthful projection captures this first-person story well. He delivers tonal shifts that reflect Henry’s emotions as the story progresses and produces realistic voices for the other characters. He also captures Henry’s wry humor as he contemplates what it means to control the fate of the world. L.E. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2015-09-16
Extraterrestrials offer depressed, acerbic Henry Denton the chance to save the Earth from certain destruction by pressing a red button. The stalk-eyed, variably tentacled sluggers' repeated, humiliating abductions and habit of dumping Henry in strange places with minimal clothing make Henry's life tough, but the focus here is less on the aliens and more on the button. Bullied at school, pushed around at home, and reeling from his once-boyfriend's suicide, Henry doesn't think he wants to press it. "If you knew the world was going to end but you could prevent it, would you?" becomes a sort of refrain throughout, and each character who answers not only reveals his or her own carefully imagined depths, but also sheds light on Henry's existential dilemmas. Whether Henry is hooking up in secret with the popular golden boy who torments him in public, watching his beloved Nana lose her memories, or being physically and verbally assaulted at school, at parties, and online, he maintains a biting, vulgar wit. There is both a budding romance and, via Henry's older brother, a baby on the way, but the novel meticulously avoids easy fixes for Henry's nihilism. Instead, his journey is subtle and hard-won, with meditations on the past, the present, and the future that are equal parts sarcastic and profound. Bitterly funny, with a ray of hope amid bleakness. (Fiction. 14-18)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170948000
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	04/26/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

We Are the Ants


Life is bullshit.

Consider your life for a moment. Think about all those little rituals that sustain you throughout your day—from the moment you wake up until that last, lonely midnight hour when you guzzle a gallon of NyQuil to drown out the persistent voice in your head. The one that whispers you should give up, give in, that tomorrow won’t be better than today. Think about the absurdity of brushing your teeth, of arguing with your mother over the appropriateness of what you’re wearing to school, of homework, of grade-point averages and boyfriends and hot school lunches.

And life.

Think about the absurdity of life.

When you break down the things we do every day to their component pieces, you begin to understand how ridiculous they are. Like kissing, for instance. You wouldn’t let a stranger off the street spit into your mouth, but you’ll swap saliva with the boy or girl who makes your heart race and your pits sweat and gives you boners at the worst fucking times. You’ll stick your tongue in his mouth or her mouth or their mouth, and let them reciprocate without stopping to consider where else their tongue has been, or whether they’re giving you mouth herpes or mono or leftover morsels of their tuna-salad sandwich.

We shave our legs and pluck our eyebrows and slather our bodies with creams and lotions. We starve ourselves so we can fit into the perfect pair of jeans, we pollute our bodies with drugs to increase our muscles so we’ll look ripped without a shirt. We drive fast and party hard and study for exams that don’t mean dick in the grand scheme of the cosmos.

Physicists have theorized that we live in an infinite and infinitely expanding universe, and that everything in it will eventually repeat. There are infinite copies of your mom and your dad and your clothes-stealing little sister. There are infinite copies of you. Despite what you’ve spent your entire life believing, you are not a special snowflake. Somewhere out there, another you is living your life. Chances are, they’re living it better. They’re learning to speak French or screwing their brains out instead of loafing on the couch in their boxers, stuffing their face with bowl after bowl of Fruity Oatholes while wondering why they’re all alone on a Friday night. But that’s not even the worst part. What’s really going to send you running over the side of the nearest bridge is that none of it matters. I’ll die, you’ll die, we’ll all die, and the things we’ve done, the choices we’ve made, will amount to nothing.

Out in the world, crawling in a field at the edge of some bullshit town with a name like Shoshoni or Medicine Bow, is an ant. You weren’t aware of it. Didn’t know whether it was a soldier, a drone, or the queen. Didn’t care if it was scouting for food to drag back to the nest or building new tunnels for wriggly ant larvae. Until now that ant simply didn’t exist for you. If I hadn’t mentioned it, you would have continued on with your life, pinballing from one tedious task to the next—shoving your tongue into the bacterial minefield of your girlfriend’s mouth, doodling the variations of your combined names on the cover of your notebook—waiting for electronic bits to zoom through the air and tell you that someone was thinking about you. That for one fleeting moment you were the most significant person in someone else’s insignificant life. But whether you knew about it or not, that ant is still out there doing ant things while you wait for the next text message to prove that out of the seven billion self-centered people on this planet, you are important. Your entire sense of self-worth is predicated upon your belief that you matter, that you matter to the universe.

But you don’t.

Because we are the ants.

• • •

I didn’t waste time thinking about the future until the night the sluggers abducted me and told me the world was going to end.

I’m not insane. When I tell you the human race is toast, I’m not speaking hyperbolically the way people do when they say we’re all dying from the moment our mothers evict us from their bodies into a world where everything feels heavier and brighter and far too loud. I’m telling you that tomorrow—­January 29, 2016—you can kiss your Chipotle-eating, Frappuccino-drinking, fat ass good-bye.

You probably don’t believe me—I wouldn’t in your place—but I’ve had 143 days to come to terms with our inevitable destruction, and I’ve spent most of those days thinking about the future. Wondering whether I have or want one, trying to decide if the end of existence is a tragedy, a comedy, or as inconsequential as that chem lab I forgot to turn in last week.

But the real joke isn’t that the sluggers revealed to me the date of Earth’s demise; it’s that they offered me the choice to prevent it.

You asked for a story, so here it is. I’ll begin with the night the sluggers told me the world was toast, and when I’m finished, we can wait for the end together.

Videos