Everything Matters!

Lore & Background

The novel centers on Junior Thibodeau, who is born with the exact details of the end of the world by a comet. He grows up with a troubled childhood, surrounded by his quiet ex-Marine father, his secretly-alcoholic mother, and his drug-addict-turned-baseball-savant brother Rodney. A constant voice has stuck with him since birth, outlining his life and the apocalypse. Junior questions the importance of love and battles various addictions, falling in love with a classmate named Amy, who leaves him after he tells her about the voices. Junior's father dies of terminal lung cancer, not in a car accident.

Reader's Guide

Later in life, Junior becomes an alcoholic and smoker while his brother becomes a major baseball star. Junior and a co-worker conspire to destroy a social security building; Junior backs out, but the friend blows it up after evacuating occupants. Junior is arrested and sent to a Bulgarian gulag, where he meets a government agent who reveals world governments know about the comet. Junior accepts a job in exchange for his parents' financial security. He develops a cure for his father's terminal lung cancer, but his father later dies in a car accident. Amy, after leaving her boyfriend, travels to the funeral, is arrested by a federal agent, tortured, and has a pinkie cut off. Junior arrives and has the agent killed. They reconcile but decide not to leave before the comet hits. Amy later changes her mind and is killed by a suicide bomber while signing up for Emigration. The voices reveal Junior can pick another version of himself from another universe. He goes back in time to when he told Amy about the voices, instead instigates sex, marries her, develops a revolutionary irrigation system, and has a daughter named Ruby. He does not save his father this time. When the comet arrives, the family sits in the bedroom as it hits Earth.

Did You Know?

• The novel won the 2010 Alex Award from the American Library Association.
• The protagonist, Junior Thibodeau, knows from birth that a runaway comet will hit Earth 36 years and 168 days after he is born.
• Junior's brother Rodney becomes a major baseball star after being a drug addict.

The Premise of Inevitability

Everything Matters! poses a deceptively simple philosophical question at its core: if the end is already written, does any choice carry weight? Ron Currie Jr.'s 2009 second novel follows a young man who, from the very moment of his birth, possesses precise knowledge of when and how Earth will be destroyed. A voice that has accompanied him since before he drew his first breath lays out his entire expected life in a rapid, almost casual list—learning to walk, running, loving, weeping, reading, tying shoelaces, bathing—and then drops the bomb: thirty-six years and one hundred sixty-eight days after his birth, a runaway comet will strike the planet with violent force. The protagonist, Junior Thibodeau, must navigate every ordinary human experience while carrying this certainty. The novel interrogates whether love, ambition, or even survival retain meaning when the final page has already been turned. This tension between foreknowledge and free will drives every relationship, every moral choice, and every act of defiance Junior undertakes across the book's sprawling narrative.

A Fractured Family Portrait

Junior Thibodeau's childhood is shaped by a household where silence and self-destruction coexist. His father is a quiet, powerful ex-Marine whose stoicism offers little comfort. His mother hides a secret battle with alcoholism behind a withdrawn exterior. His older brother Rodney drifts through a period of drug addiction before emerging as a major baseball star, a trajectory that stands in stark contrast to Junior's own downward spiral into heavy smoking and drinking. The family's dysfunction becomes a backdrop against which Junior's existential crisis plays out. His most significant relationship is with a classmate named Amy, whom he loves deeply but ultimately loses after confessing the voices that have haunted him since birth. Her departure crystallizes the novel's central fear: that even the most intimate human bonds are rendered fragile when one person carries the weight of the world's expiration date. Junior's addictions, his brother's fame, and his parents' quiet suffering all orbit the same void—the knowledge that none of it will last.

Defiance, Consequence, and the Multiverse

The novel's middle and later stretches push Junior toward increasingly extreme acts. He and a co-worker plot to destroy a social security building; Junior ultimately backs out, but his friend carries out the explosion after evacuating the occupants. Junior is arrested and shipped to a Bulgarian gulag, where a government agent named Sawyer reveals that major world powers are already aware of the approaching comet. Junior accepts a job for the agency in exchange for securing his parents' financial future. In a harrowing sequence, he works himself to near-death over a single week to develop a cure for his father's terminal lung cancer, only to watch the man recover and then die in a car accident after falling asleep at the wheel. The narrative then fractures: the voices offer Junior the chance to select an alternate version of himself from another universe and swap places. He does, rewinding to the moment he told Amy about the voices. This time he stays silent, and the story blooms into marriage, a revolutionary irrigation system for third-world nations, and a daughter named Ruby. Yet Junior makes the agonizing choice not to save his father this round, and when the comet finally arrives, his entire family gathers in his bedroom and simply sits together as the sky falls.

Critical Reception and Industry Recognition

Though it is Ron Currie Jr.'s second novel, Everything Matters! earned immediate and notable recognition upon its 2009 release. Amazon included it among its Best Books of the Year that same year, signaling strong reader engagement and commercial interest. The following year, the American Library Association selected it for its 2010 Alex Award, an honor that highlights books appealing to young adult readers and suggests the novel's themes of identity, agency, and confronting an inescapable future resonated powerfully with that demographic. Critic Janet Maslin of the New York Times reviewed the book, and her summary captures the novel's distinctive voice: the omniscient narrator that addresses the unborn child directly, rattling off life's milestones with breezy efficiency before delivering the comet's arrival date as though it were a minor scheduling detail. Maslin's framing underscores how Currie Jr. blends cosmic dread with an almost domestic intimacy, making the apocalypse feel less like a spectacle and more like a deadline one must live around. The combination of genre ambition, philosophical depth, and accessible prose helped the novel find a devoted readership well beyond typical science-fiction or literary-fiction shelves.