Megan Abbott

A Richard and Judy Book Club selection. The End of Everything by Megan Abbott, author of Dare Me, is a taut and suspenseful novel of friendship, loss and the dark undercurrents of adolscence. A close-knit street, the clink of glass on glass, summer heat. Two girls on the brink of adolescence, throwing cartwheels on the grass. Two girls who tell each other everything. Until one shimmering afternoon, one of them disappears. Lizzie is left with her dread and her loss, and with a fear that won't let her be. Had Evie tried to give her a hint of what was coming, a clue that she failed to follow? Caught between her imaginary guilt, her sense of betrayal, her own powerful need, and the needs of the adults around her, Lizzie's voice is as unforgettable as her story is arresting. This is no ordinary tale of innocence lost . . .

A Richard and Judy Book Club Selection

The End of Everything

From the award-winning author of The Turnout and Dare Me: a "mesmerizing psychological thriller" about a teenage girl who disappears during a 1980s suburban summer (Los Angeles Times). Thirteen-year old Lizzie Hood and her next door neighbor Evie Verver are inseparable. They are best friends who swap bathing suits and field-hockey sticks, and share everything that's happened to them. Together they live in the shadow of Evie's glamorous older sister Dusty, who provides a window on the exotic, intoxicating possibilities of their own teenage horizons. To Lizzie, the Verver household, presided over by Evie's big-hearted father, is the world's most perfect place. And then, one afternoon, Evie disappears. The only clue: a maroon sedan Lizzie spotted driving past the two girls earlier in the day. As a rabid, giddy panic spreads through the Midwestern suburban community, everyone looks to Lizzie for answers. Was Evie unhappy, troubled, upset? Had she mentioned being followed? Would she have gotten into the car of a stranger? Lizzie takes up her own furtive pursuit of the truth, prowling nights through backyards, peering through windows, pushing herself to the dark center of Evie's world. Haunted by dreams of her lost friend and titillated by her own new power at the center of the disappearance, Lizzie uncovers secrets and lies that make her wonder if she knew her best friend at all.

A Novel

bianca

Wanting something so badly, you make it so.

We’re no longer two summer-brown kids with tangles of hair and jutting kid teeth. I don’t know when it happened, but it did. Lately, things had been hovering in her face, and I couldn’t fathom it. I had things too, new things twisting under my skin, but I didn’t know what they were. It felt like she knew her own zigzagging heart, and I was just killing time.

And with Evie gone, I can see things had been changing for who knew how long. It was like the scar on her thigh, the one I could feel beneath my own fingers, had slithered from my own leg back to hers.

It’s happening, that’s what I think, but even as the words come to me, I don’t know what they mean. In some tucked-off way, it seems like whatever is happening had already been happening, for so long, a falling feeling inside, something nameless, a perilous feeling, and I don’t know what to do with it.

Do I see it in her expression, as she looks at me, as she pulls her face into blankness? Do I hear her say, in some low register, a creeping knowingness always between us? Do I hear her say, 

This is the last time, this is the last time

A moment alone, I would steal a peek in Dusty’s room, clogged with the cotton smell of baby powder and lip gloss and hands wet with hair spray. Her bed was a big pink cake with faintly soiled flounces and her floor dappled with the tops of nail polish bottles, with plastic-backed brushes heavy with hair, with daisy-dappled underwear curled up like pipe cleaner, jeans inside out, the powdery socks still in them, folded-up notes from all her rabid boyfriends, shiny tampon wrappers caught in the edge of the bedspread, where it hit the mint green carpet. It seemed like Dusty was forever cleaning the room, but even she herself could not stop the constant, effervescing explosions of girl.

Megan E. Abbott

Thirteen-year old Lizzie Hood and her next door neighbor Evie Verver are inseparable. They are best friends who swap bathing suits and field-hockey sticks, and share everything that's happened to them. Together they live in the shadow of Evie's glamorous older sister Dusty, who provides a window on the exotic, intoxicating possibilities of their own teenage horizons. To Lizzie, the Verver household, presided over by Evie's big-hearted father, is the world's most perfect place. And then, one afternoon, Evie disappears. The only clue: a maroon sedan Lizzie spotted driving past the two girls earlier in the day. As a rabid, giddy panic spreads through the Midwestern suburban community, everyone looks to Lizzie for answers. Was Evie unhappy, troubled, upset? Had she mentioned being followed? Would she have gotten into the car of a stranger? Lizzie takes up her own furtive pursuit of the truth, prowling nights through backyards, peering through windows, pushing herself to the dark center of Evie's world. Haunted by dreams of her lost friend and titillated by her own new power at the center of the disappearance, Lizzie uncovers secrets and lies that make her wonder if she knew her best friend at all.

ohseababy

read into the early A.M.'s because of the delicious and booming sense of dread that Abott is so delightfully good at building up. but I'm still loathe to accept that a quick and neat tie-up and explanation at the end of nearly 250 pages of winding your reader up so tight is anything remarkable. 

definitely a subtly, and then deeply, disturbing read, and I don't regret it. but I'm not sure that I wouldn't have rather spent my hours on something else.

Allison Raines

If I am a swimmer, this book has drowned me.

Jessica Smith

I was enjoying this for the first three-quarters or so, but then it rapidly got too squicky for my tastes. It starts out as a rumination on preteen/early teenage girl life, with Lizzie and Evie as close as close can be until the latter suddenly goes missing. So far, so similar to The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone (which I only read a few months ago, and did a great telling of this kind of story). However from there, The End of Everything morphs into something more reminiscent of Lolita, with a steadily increasing amount of emphasis on pubescent girls getting inappropriate attention from fully-grown men (not wanting to spoil too much). But see, in Lolita, the whole point of the story is that Humbert Humbert is completely fucking delusional in his belief that Lola has knowingly seduced him. The End of Everything has missed this point, and plays its story straight as one of mutual attraction and seduction.

Now, Megan Abbott's storylines are usually pretty dark and twisted and I certainly wouldn't say enjoying this one means you must be a bad person. It was just too dark for me. However, I do think the blurb did the novel a disservice by not making it clear what the core theme of the novel was. No one sells Lolita as, like, an odd couple fugitive novel, and in being more disturbing this one needs the warning much more! Some people in the comments of other reviews have claimed that if you warn people what the central theme is then that's a “spoiler”, but wtf, people need to be able to make informed decisions about what they read too.

This is not an objectively bad book - indeed, if you don't think your sensibilities will be offended by the major theme then you can expect the reward of a well-written thriller with some real relatability for anyone who's ever been a 12-13 year old girl. But also know that if you are interested in that kind of story, The Van Apfel Girls does a very similar thing without the Lolita element, and I thought it was better.

Jessica 

Blog | Twitter | Instagram | ...like all that you are is the wanting, and the rest of you just burns away?

If there's only one thing to be said about an author like Megan Abbott, it should be this: she breathes life into her words and the characters only grow from there. She understand the complexities of being a young girl or woman--she just knows how the tone of life is for us. More than this, she is able to speak to parts of us that are often ignored in literature; teasing us with that ounce of fiction mixed in with what connects us to the characters. The End of Everything is just the same, a story of girlhood and the possible loss of innocence. 

There's a dreamy quality to it that bridges the characters thoughts (both realistic and not) to our own way of processing things. As usual, the flow of it is vivid and velvety smooth, exactly what literature is meant to be. It is thought provoking and compelling, tying us to the pages of the bigger mysteries we see unraveling. I've always felt that Abbott understands things about what a reader finds captivating better than her peers and even in some of her weaker releases, this much is clear. 

Something about The End of Everything feels like real time. Abbott writes the story in a way that pulls you from the start and holds you firmly. Each chapter provides an insight the previous didn't and keeps readers on their toes. The further you fall, the more you find yourself lost in the most delicious ways possible. The End of Everything feels like more than a book. It feels like a world or a film all in its own right. 

We've got nostalgia and mystery. Youth and adults. Relationships that may or may not border on inappropriate. Characters that are quite close to being reliable but just aren't. There's a lot going through your mind as you dive into Evie's disappearance, Lizzie's desire to help her best friend's family, Dusty's mysterious air, etc etc. All of ties into a bigger picture that you may or may not see coming and that's what's always compelling. 

That's what Megan Abbott does best. She messes with your mind in the most mundane ways and it is chill inducing. I love the way her mind works and the way she spins stories from thoughts and words. No one can pen a teenage girl's mind half as well as she can--and the same can be said about the way crimes, violence, mystery and sexuality are woven into her novels. The End of Everything has more than enough to offer a reader and is a story you won't soon forget.

The End of Everything A Richard and Judy Book Club Selection

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