Review - It Ends With You by S K Wright

Review - It Ends With You by S K Wright

If I'd told the truth, it would have been fiction.

Everyone loves Eva. Beautiful, bright, fun, generous - she's perfect.

So when her body is found in a ditch in the local woods the only thing anyone wants to know is: Who could have done this?

It has to be Luke, her boyfriend. He has the motive, the means, the opportunity and he's no stranger to the police.

Even though the picture is incomplete, the pieces fit. But as time passes, stories change.

Who could have done this? You decide.

An overly busy and ultimately disappointing YA crime thriller.

The constant jumps in POV character are quite jarring. The story is told from so many different perspectives, I'm not even sure how many different POV characters we had in the end. One of them gets barely a couple of lines in. Another one gets a single chapter. The main suspect, Luke, gets the most, including several consecutive chapters, to build pace and suspense I think. 

Then there's the format changes. We get first person narratives. We get letters between characters. We get blogs and WhatsApp messages and Facebook comments and YouTube videos. The constant shift in narrative style is clearly intended as a kind of mass-media storytelling but frankly it got a bit tiresome before too long.

The characters are all awful! Everyone is lying about everything from the very beginning, more concerned with protecting themselves than finding a murderer. The only exception to that is maybe Carolina, who flip-flops constantly in her loyalties, despite her determination to be a great detective she's a blatant victim of her own, ever changing, biases. It was hard to feel any sympathy for either Eva, the manipulative, game-playing victim, or Luke, the angry main protagonist, who was trying to overcome the prejudices the world apparently had against him (though as he seemed to be part of the in-crowd it's hard to see exactly what they were) but gave in to a violent temper at the slightest provocation. The investigating officer is completely dreadful, the teachers not much better, and the rest of the class mates are vacuous and empty-headed.

For all the attempts at narrative cleverness, the plot has no satisfying resolution at all. We think we know who was responsible, revealed perhaps in a long epilogue, but for no reason that I could see. Character motivation is not something indulged in here. The trial is shortened to a serious of character statements, with no mention at all about serious and significant police failings that should have had any other case thrown out of court.

Oh, and I'm not even going to get started with the "You've hit 3 million vlog followers, so here's a publishing contract. Your book is coming out in 4 months" or a bird watcher wanting to go to the Outer Hebrides to see kestrels. Yikes!

It Ends With You tries for clever and complex storytelling. Unfortunately it ends with disappointment.

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It Ends With You by S K Wright is out now, published by Little, Brown Book Co.

I was given a review copy via Netgalley in return for an honest review.