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.
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Megan Abbott is one of my favorite authors, and it took me way too long to read this one. Her plots are creepy, but while she’s spinning a dark mystery, she evokes the strange beauty of adolescence in a way that stays with me.
Very, very dark and good. I liked the way this novel was so gradual in the way it darkened. If you read the premise, you know its twisted from the get-go, but Abbott reaches new levels of twisted around halfway through and then again towards the end.
Abbott also makes a lot of really interesting choices in terms of perspective and tense — it …
Few authors can create complex teenage characters like Megan Abbott. The End of Everything is a multi-layered examination into the lives of young girls on the cusp of womanhood. There are moments of such startling realism that I wanted to go back and share it with my own 13-year-old self.
Lizzie and Evie have been best friends forever. They are …
The End of Everything by Megan Abbott has an unreliable narrator –that is my least favorite thing in a book—-but the story is well written and the emotions are raw. The subject matter is quite dark in tone, though it doesn’t slap you all at once, slowly building in tone until we see and understand the explosion. The angst of early teen years …
beautifully written. very creepy subject -love of young girls to grown up men. but Abbott making it in amazing way, with deep understanding of emotions of girls on the verge of being women. it took me a while to get into it but once in it got hold till the spin in end. great work of writing.
An interesting view into the mind of a teenage girl in the midst of confusion and potential tragedy as her friend goes missing.