A review by amyv
The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

3.0

Sometimes Abbott writes beautifully, and precisely captures the experience of being a (certain type of) teenage girl. Other times she uses purple prose, meaningless descriptions, and too many instances of "I felt something," "I knew something," "I saw something" to count. I was engaged enough to move through this book pretty quickly, but there were long sections that dragged between suspenseful scenes. And the end left me feeling... unsettled, but not in a way that felt deliberate.

Spoiler

I share the uneasy view of some other reviewers that the narration seems to frame these preteen girls as inviting their own abuse. Perhaps this reflected the immaturity of the narrator's worldview, but since Abbott begins the book with an older narrator reflecting back, it's hard to understand why that older voice couldn't provide some additional reflection at any point. I felt the book veered uncomfortably close to treating these girls as sirens, or to enjoying the consequences of their naïveté in a lascivious way.