But it's also about friendship and relationships. Instead of making the novel seem choppy, or the characters under-developed, Westerfeld's split narration makes every character much more dimensional. There are very few male writers who can convincingly narrate from a female point of view. Making everyone wonder if the band's music is the one thing that can stop the apocalypse. But strange things happen when Minerva starts to sing. Soon Pearl finds the perfect band members. Pearl decides that the best way to help her friend, and maybe get through the craziness, is to start a band. Then there's Pearl's friend, Minerva, who's been acting pretty weird herself. Then there are the rats that are slowly taking over the subway system. Pearl sees the weird things going on in the city. It all starts with a girl who wants to make a band. As is the issue of a pending apocalypse.īut that doesn't tell you much about the story.
The whole vampire thing is an unknown for everyone. In this novel, Westerfeld's narrators are in the interesting position that they know less than the readers (this is why reading Peeps first is so important). Writing a novel in this way is incredibly difficult because you have to take into account continuity while also making sure you don't get redundant and trying to make each character sound unique. Each chapter is labeled with a character's name and told from his or her point of view. Westerfeld again employs first person narration, but this time he has five narrators. Most of these differences are structural. Suffice it to say, The Last Days is a very different book from its predecessor despite continuing the same story. So, this is a sequel in the same way that The Two Towers was (trick statement! Tolkien meant the Lord of the Rings trilogy to be one book but it was too long and written before the days of ginormous novels).
For my part, I think of this novel as more of a companion to Peeps because the main characters are completely different (don't worry though, characters from Peeps do turn up), the structure of then novel is different, and because the only way to get the most out of either book is to read the two of them together, back-to-back. Most everyone calls The Last Days a sequel to Westerfeld's novel Peeps.
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