Title: A Beginning at the End
Author: Mike Chen
Publication Information: MIRA. 2020. 400 pages.
ISBN: 0778309347 / 978-0778309345
Book Source: I received this book through NetGalley free of cost in exchange for an honest review.
Opening Sentence: "People were too scared for music tonight."
Favorite Quote: "See, relations are people with the same blood. But family, that's different. Family is about who gives you hope, who gets involved. And earns the right for forgiveness. Or at least starts down the path."
Mike Chen's novel Here and Now and Then was a family drama mixed with a science fiction story. A Beginning at the End picks up on the same themes. It is several family dramas in the midst of a post-apocalyptic world. The setting is San Francisco. The time is 2025.
A flu epidemic has wiped out half the world and left so many societal things we take for granted in shambles. Society is rebuilding, but, of course, differing opinions exist on how best to do so. The government has a "Big Brother" like feel.
Moira Gorman, formerly known as teenage pop star MoJo, used the chaos of the epidemic and a government quarantine to essentially run away from her life as a music star. More importantly, she ran away from her father, who used her as a business enterprise. She has reinvented herself but hides her history, not wanting to be found.
Rob Donelly is a single father to seven year old Sunny. He lost his wife in the quarantine. His life and his daughter's have not reconciled with that loss. In fact, a lie Rob tells Sunny about her mother threatens their very lives. He goes on but continues to hide his lie.
Krista is an event planner, determined to be fiercely independent. Her motto is, "Only forward. Never back. And definitely never paused." The issue with that is unless you face and reconcile with the past, how can you ever truly move forward. She pushes forward, always running from and hiding the past.
The lives of these four individuals intersect and come together in a way that none of them expects. The plot of the book centers on MoJo's father's search for her and Sunny's longing for her mother set against the possible impending doom of another epidemic.
The book moves back and forth between their perspectives, slowly developing their connections and revealing their back stories. About two-thirds of the way through the book, the story turns into an action adventure going up the west coast of the United States. All of a sudden, the histories and emotions of lifetimes are resolved, and relationships are cleanly arranged and neatly packaged.
That perhaps is the reason I leave the book slightly unsatisfied. The characters are all interesting. Their back stories are individual, real, and engaging. However, the quick turn into a happily ever after (as much as that can be true with doom lurking around the corner!) does not work. Life is not that clean and not that neat. Family histories can be resolved. Childhood traumas can be overcome. Just not at the speed at which they seem to occur in this book.
This book has a very clear message. In fact, it is stated outright twice in the final few pages of the book:
Mike Chen's novel Here and Now and Then was a family drama mixed with a science fiction story. A Beginning at the End picks up on the same themes. It is several family dramas in the midst of a post-apocalyptic world. The setting is San Francisco. The time is 2025.
A flu epidemic has wiped out half the world and left so many societal things we take for granted in shambles. Society is rebuilding, but, of course, differing opinions exist on how best to do so. The government has a "Big Brother" like feel.
Moira Gorman, formerly known as teenage pop star MoJo, used the chaos of the epidemic and a government quarantine to essentially run away from her life as a music star. More importantly, she ran away from her father, who used her as a business enterprise. She has reinvented herself but hides her history, not wanting to be found.
Rob Donelly is a single father to seven year old Sunny. He lost his wife in the quarantine. His life and his daughter's have not reconciled with that loss. In fact, a lie Rob tells Sunny about her mother threatens their very lives. He goes on but continues to hide his lie.
Krista is an event planner, determined to be fiercely independent. Her motto is, "Only forward. Never back. And definitely never paused." The issue with that is unless you face and reconcile with the past, how can you ever truly move forward. She pushes forward, always running from and hiding the past.
The lives of these four individuals intersect and come together in a way that none of them expects. The plot of the book centers on MoJo's father's search for her and Sunny's longing for her mother set against the possible impending doom of another epidemic.
The book moves back and forth between their perspectives, slowly developing their connections and revealing their back stories. About two-thirds of the way through the book, the story turns into an action adventure going up the west coast of the United States. All of a sudden, the histories and emotions of lifetimes are resolved, and relationships are cleanly arranged and neatly packaged.
That perhaps is the reason I leave the book slightly unsatisfied. The characters are all interesting. Their back stories are individual, real, and engaging. However, the quick turn into a happily ever after (as much as that can be true with doom lurking around the corner!) does not work. Life is not that clean and not that neat. Family histories can be resolved. Childhood traumas can be overcome. Just not at the speed at which they seem to occur in this book.
This book has a very clear message. In fact, it is stated outright twice in the final few pages of the book:
- "See, relations are people with the same blood. But family, that's different. Family is about who gives you hope, who gets involved. And earns the right for forgiveness. Or at least starts down the path."
- "As a community, we still emphasized the importance of familial ties but finally understood that the definition of family wasn't about blood or even who or what you'd lost. It was about what gave you hope and who was willing to get involved."
A Beginning at the End
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Blog Tour
Author: Mike Chen
ISBN: 9780778309345, 0778309347
Publication Date: 1/14/2020
Author Bio:
Mike Chen is a lifelong writer, from crafting fan fiction as a child to somehow getting paid for words as an adult. He has contributed to major geek websites (The Mary Sue, The Portalist, Tor) and covered the NHL for mainstream media outlets. A member of SFWA and Codex Writers, Mike lives in the Bay Area, where he can be found playing video games and watching Doctor Who with his wife, daughter, and rescue animals.
Author Q&A:
Q: Parent characters are a large part of A Beginning at the End. Did you know your character's family backgrounds before you began? How do the characters take form in your writing process?
A: Somewhat. Usually the core problem comes first in my drafting process. I tend to write in layers and my initial drafts are always very light -- initial scenes may only be about ¼ of their final length because I don’t know the characters too well yet. At that stage, I’m trying to find the main conflict of the scene and the voice for their characters. I typically need 5-7 passes through a book to turn it from a 45k-50k word skeleton to a reasonably polished 90-100k word draft. During that time, the characters start to form.
As an example, my current work in progress (which will be released after 2021’s upcoming WE COULD BE HEROES), I’m on my third pass through for the first act and only now am I beginning to understand each character’s unique voice as well as their physical appearances. Core conflicts (such as character X has trouble with character Y) are established during the initial outline phase as part of the initial concept, but the how and why those conflicts happen (Is it family history? Is it a traumatic event? Is it sibling rivalry?), that takes a little longer to establish.
For the characters in A BEGINNING AT THE END, I started out immediately knowing what drove Krista and Rob. Moira didn’t really become fully three-dimensional until much later, and in fact in early revisions, she was just a minor supporting character. My agent noted that she was far too interesting to push to the side, so the book was rebuilt around her to hold equal footing to Rob and Krista.
Q: Where did you take inspiration for this pandemic? Do you have any other book or film recommendations?
A: Though it wasn’t a direct inspiration for this book, there’s a scene in the second season of The Walking Dead that began the train of thought for A BEGINNING AT THE END. It was the season on Hershel’s farm, and there’s a scene where Lori is trying to go over homework with her son Carl. A lot of viewers mocked the scene at the time with comments like “Why would you do math in the zombie apocalypse?” but I thought that was a smart bit of human grounding against a fantastical backdrop. Because those characters didn’t know if and when the apocalypse would end, and I think it makes sense that 1) a mom would try to keep some form of normalcy for her son 2) they wouldn’t just assume the world was completely over.
Because a lot of apocalyptic fiction focuses on either the event itself or a grim dark survival world, that scene sparked a lot of ideas for me -- what if society did crawl back from the brink, and instead of a true “end of the world” it was more like a big pause button? Then all these people would move past day-to-day survival and suddenly have a lot of trauma to unpack, and i hadn’t really seen that covered much at the time. That seemed really interesting to me, much more so than the idea of tribal factions attacking each other to survive.
Q: Which main character is your favorite? And which was the hardest to write?
A: It's been interesting seeing early reader feedback because the "favorite character" opinion has been pretty evenly split. I think that's a good sign that things are pretty balanced. For me personally, I always viewed Krista as the main character in this book and it was originally written with her to be the main focus (the original draft of this from 2011ish only had her POV and Rob's POV). She has such a snappy voice that it's just fun to write her responses and reactions to stuff, and a big challenge came from cutting out unnecessary dialogue that made it in there simply because she was so fun to write.
The hardest character to write was definitely Sunny. Simply because I needed to get into the head of a seven-year-old. Her POV was one of the last major structural changes my agent recommended before we sold this to my publisher and it was tricky my daughter was still very young at that point (she's still only five). I ran those chapters by my friends who had survived parenting those years for accuracy: complexity of thought, vocabulary, rhythm, etc.
Q: Your characters struggle with confronting their past while their future is so uncertain. What are some important lessons you've learned as a writer that you previously struggled with?
A: I think the keys to success as a writer are also keys to a happy and fulfilled life: don't give up and keep an open mind. Every writer I know that started around my time eventually broke through and got an agent by improving their craft through feedback and simply chipping away. If one book wasn't good enough, then it got shelved as a stepping stone and they marched forward. Doing that requires a certain amount of humility because it recognizes that you've got room to improve, and that improvement is going to come from listening to others rather than being defensive. Those are hard lessons to learn so I try to tell new writers that right away, so they understand the value of harsh-but-true constructive criticism from critique partners -- you'll never make it without that.
Q: What is a genre you don't think you'd ever write? A Beginning at the End and Here and Now and Then are both SF, do you think you would ever write something that's vastly different? What draws you to SF?
A: Writing character-driven stories in sci-fi settings comes pretty naturally to me, as it takes my favorite type of story (slice of life) and my favorite genre and brings them together. I'm fortunate that the market has turned around on that now to support books like mine. If I wrote something different, I imagine it would lean further in one direction or another -- either a contemporary drama or space opera. I am also a big fan of gothic horror, and I would love to try a haunted house story at some point.
As for what draws me to sci-fi, I can't put my finger on it but it's been really important to me my entire life. I grew up on Star Wars and Robotech as cornerstones of my media influences. At the same time, I've never really been too into fantasy despite them often being opposite sides of the same coin. My wife loves both sci-fi and fantasy, and there are things she loves that I just can't get into like The Elder Scrolls.
Q: What are some of your writing goals for the future?
A: Keep writing and not run out of ideas! In a perfect world, I'd love to be able to be a full-time author -- which is basically 50% writing and 50% the business of being an author. I don't think that's feasible since I live in Silicon Valley and need health insurance for a family situation, so I will likely always have one foot in corporate life unless the political landscape changes regarding medical care.
An obvious dream would be to have one of my books be adapted to a movie or TV series -- I'm of the mindset that HERE AND NOW AND THEM would work as a movie while A BEGINNING AT THE END has a deep enough world that it would work well as a TV series. I really want to try writing a video game, something like Telltale's games. And I would love to write for my favorite franchises: Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who. I've been pretty vocal about Clone Wars-era story ideas, and I'm friends with several authors on the Lucasfilm roster, so fingers crossed.
Q: If there was a global disaster in the future, what would your plan of action be?
A: Well, I have a bunch of animals and family health issues, so I'd say we'd be pretty screwed. I'm pretty organized and have a diplomatic approach, so hopefully that would earn me an in with some survivalists until society stabilizes.
Q: Both of your books, Here and Now and Then & A Beginning at the End, have a strong emotional foundation. Why did you choose that route?
A: It goes back to my favorite types of stories. To me, the emotional core is always the most important part of any story; it turns it from being surface level entertainment to something that resonates deeper.
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Author website: https://www.mikechenbooks.com/
Twitter: @mikechenwriter
Instagram: @mikechenwriter
Facebook: @mikechenwriter
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