What's in this book
- Megan Abbott's 2011 novel - Lizzie Hood's best friend Evie Verver disappears from their suburban neighborhood
- New York Times Notable Book 2011; one of the strongest contemporary American novels about adolescent female friendship
- 256 pages of patient first-person Lizzie narration across the slow summer of the disappearance
- Author also wrote Dare Me (2012) and Give Me Your Hand (2018), the broader Abbott catalog
- Heather Henderson audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Bury Me Deep, Dare Me, and contemporary American literary suspense
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The End of Everything is the Megan Abbott novel I find hardest to talk about, because the whole book operates on the line between adolescent friendship and something the adult world cannot yet name. The narrator is Lizzie, thirteen, who watches her best friend Evie get into a car and not come home. The investigation that follows is the framework. The interior of Lizzie's head is the book.
Abbott is doing several things at once. She is writing about the specific, dense charge between two girls on the edge of adolescence. She is writing about how families fail to see what they need to see. She is writing about how a missing-child case looks from inside a household when the child is not yours but your friend's. None of these get foregrounded with capital letters. They just accumulate.
The prose is the densest Abbott has written. Reading the book feels like being in a hot room that you cannot leave. The closing pages land with a calm that is more disturbing than violence would be.
Five stars, with the warning that the book deals with the seduction of a minor as its central matter. Abbott handles it with care and seriousness. It is still hard to read in the way it should be.
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