Two teens puzzle out their strange circumstances when they appear to be the only two people left on Earth. Seventeen-year-old Hannah Ashton is a serious ballet dancer on the brink of an audition that will launch her professional career when she wakes up to discover the world basically unchanged--except that she is totally alone in her home city of Houston. After five days of anxious solitude, she is filled with relief when she encounters Leo Sterling, a cute fellow senior she barely knows from school, at a music store next to her best friend's family's bookstore. Leo, a free-spirited musician who plays in a band known for their '80s hair metal covers, has known Hannah from afar only as "Ballet Chick," but once they meet, they are immediately drawn to one another. Alternating chapters in introspective first-person narration juxtapose their respective thoughts. As events unfold, readers get to know their drastically different ways of coping--which are in overdrive as they try to navigate environmental changes in the strange, lonely world they now inhabit. Romance fans will thrill to the slow smolder of their drawn-out attraction, which twists and turns its way through psychological drama that, while unsubtle, is offset by the effective mystery of their isolated situation. Hannah and Leo are White. Opposites attract in this engrossing romance. (Romance. 12-18) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Gr 9 Up--It's the fifth straight day of isolation for Hannah Ashton in Houston, where nothing is open and every other person has disappeared. Then she meets Leo Sterling, a stoner she avoided at school; she was more focused on ballet and her next important audition. They suspect they might be dead. Soon opposites attract and the two quickly figure out that Leo's spontaneity counteracts Hannah's caution, and that Leo would give up without Hannah's determination to survive. In the before time they might never have bonded, but finding themselves dependent, they figure out how to help--and challenge--each other. Both teens take after their mothers: Leo's was a freethinking hippie who taught her son to take life easy, while Hannah's mother infused her own sidelined dance career into her daughter, giving Hannah little choice in the matter. In alternating chapters, these two reflect on who they are and whom they want to be--when they're not battling windstorms or indulging in a bit of shape-shifting--should their futures not be in doubt. At the story's end, readers learn what really happened to bring this odd couple together. Both characters are well drawn and while the novel's sci-fi bona fides aren't quite realized, that may not matter to readers. Leo is white and Hannah's ethnicity isn't stated. VERDICT An enjoyable girl-meets-boy with a science fiction subplot.--Georgia Christgau, LaGuardia Community Coll., Long Island City, NY