The End of Everything [Versión Kindle]

Lizzie was the last person to see her best friend, Evie Verver. For thirteen years the two had been inseparable, but now Evie was gone. The only clue was the maroon car Lizzie had seen right before she left Evie to go shopping with her mom. When the police were not able to locate her, Lizzie began her own search to find out where Evie may have been taken. However, as Lizzie dug deeper, she began to realize the friend she thought she knew was someone quite different. In a dark and rather disturbing novel, The End of Everything is brilliantly written, but difficult to read.

Had I realized what this book was going to be about and how it was written, I would not have picked it up. It's a good book, but right now I just want to read something light and fluffy to wipe away the images that were left behind by this story. It's sad, disturbing, and not at all what I was expecting. Instead of a novel that revolves around solving a crime, it's told by thirteen year old Lizzie and is very much a loss of innocence book. I was not prepared to dive into a world of romanticized pedophilia or teenage sexuality. It's not that these issues were glorified, but they're there none the less and not something I was expecting or prepared to read.

This is an exceptionally well written book. Abbott has a great ability to create vivid images and evoke strong emotions. She does a nice job of setting the atmosphere and capturing the mind of a child who knows much, but really doesn't know anything. However, it's her writing talents that are also a detriment. It's hard to read a story where the thirteen year old narrator was seeing the kidnapper as possessing a great love for the child he's taken. Nor was it comfortable to read many of Lizzie's recollections with Evie, as many of them had sexual overtones. There was a strong realistic element to this story, but it wasn't something I wanted to read.

Even though I would have liked for Abbott to have left some innocence in the story, I am glad that she allowed the reader to be disgusted by the characters and their warped relationships. It would have been easy to tell the reader what they should think, but instead she lets them take the events and feel the sickness of these characters for themselves. I don't need a happily ever after ending, but there is a part of me that wishes there was a glimmer of hope in this story.

I feel much the same way about The End Of Everything as I do Lord Of The Flies. There is a terrible sadness for children when they lose their innocence; when the world and life they know is suddenly shattered and they realize things will never return to where they were before. While I think this is a brilliantly written book, I wish I hadn't read it. This is not a book for everyone.

Review title provided courtesy of Little, Brown, & Company.

Lizzie and Evie have been friends their entire lives. They share everything, from clothes to sports to thoughts and secrets. They have carved out places in sports, equaling the boys on that playing field.

Now, at 13, everything is changing. They watch Evie's 16 year old sister as she blossoms into a beautiful and feminine being, and her effect on the males in the neighborhood. The boys, other kids, adults, families, or perhaps it is their perception, their awareness that is changing.

Lizzie realizes that Evie is changing, as she herself is, too. Their discussions and secrets have taken on new tones, new topics. When Evie disappears suddenly, Lizzie still feels the connection and a responsibility to find her friend. Her bond with Evie's family gives her strength, but is also a source of mixed comfort and pain.

Lizzie has many revelations and grows up in unexpected ways in Evie's absence. She realizes things about Evie, herself, and the ways of the world. These things drive her to find Evie, but they also put an end to many things that she felt, believed, and thought she knew.

Megan Abbott has written a book that explores the frightening dark side of adolescence, regarding sexuality and what is the end of innocence. The truth is that when we lose our innocence, we lose our childhood.

Megan Abbott's new book, The End of Everything, is a strong story about family secrets and misunderstandings and a girl who doesn't really know what's going on. Abbott underplays a lot of things and the most haunting; the most visceral moments in the book are very low-key.

When her best friend Evie is kidnapped, 13-year-old Lizzie Hood launches her own investigation into the crime, uncovering a series of lies that change everything she thought she knew about herself and her friendship with Evie.

As always in Abbott's work, the characters are strong and realistic. Her view of teenage life is not unsympathetic but utterly without sentiment. When Lizzie starts hanging out with a couple of toxic teens who have their own theories about who might have taken Evie and even her own mother seems to be relishing the drama a little too much, it confirms our worst fears about suburban schadenfreude.

The plot is laced with a suppressed violence that's almost poetic and ratchets up the intensity without being obvious. Lizzie's imagined scenario about a character standing outside Evie's house, smoking and dreaming, is beautifully written.

Abbott never overstates anything, never overdoes the emotion or lets anything get melodramatic. Lizzie is not a particularly credible narrator--she's always remembering things slightly different from the way they happened--but that works for the kind of story this is.

There's a lot going on here beneath the surface and in the shadows--the concept of "shadow" is important here, both explicitly and implicitly--and the consequences of both intentions and actions have weight.

Nominally a YA novel, The End of Everything occupies territory somewhere north of the paranormal fantasies and dystopian dramas that clutter the genre. It's the kind of book that reminds us that labels on fiction are meaningless.