It Ends with You

Our Review

It Ends with You by S. K. Wright was a brilliant, unputdownable thought-provoking book.

Eva is bright, popular and well-liked so when he body is found in the local woods the whole community is in shock.

Her boyfriend Luke is from the wrong side of the tracks and is the prime suspect but over time more details emerge, and you begin to wonder if someone else could have been the murderer.

I loved It Ends with You it was a fantastic book even though it isn’t necessarily my usual kind of read.

It is clear to the reader from the beginning that Eva is not a likeable person. She comes across as manipulative, mean and vain. The kind of character you are secretly pleased has been killed off.

The book begins with a video entitled ‘bad things going down in the woods’ that has been removed by the user from a video upload website.

The prologue features someone in the woods stating, ‘I hear the scream and then I turn and run.’ The unnamed person is hoping not to be seen as they leave.

Chapter 1 is written from the point of view of the main suspect Luke on a Monday morning when the police come for him whilst he is having a play fight with his friend Rob.

From the beginning it is clear that Luke is viewed in an unfavourable manner because of the marked difference in his social status compared to his peers.

“The police are watching us closely. I’m conscious of the little differences between me and Rob. Rob wears smart black shoes, while I’m in non-regulation grey trainers with holes in them: one of my laces has broken so I’ve replaced it with an elastic band.”

Luke is at his expensive fee-paying school on a scholarship and is very much an outsider whose position in the school was only legitimised by his relationship with Eva.

The 2nd Chapter is in the form of a blog named ‘The Big Bad Blog’ which is clearly written by someone with some insider knowledge of the case and fuels suspicions that Luke is the killer.

It states that Eva is ‘the star girl’ at their school but has been hanging out with the wrong kind of people recently.

My favourite character in It Ends with You is Luke. My empathy for him began when I read the section quoted below:

“It’s hard to think straight because I’m so bloody hungry. This morning I opened the bread bin to find a loaf so green with mould I couldn’t face scraping it off.”

It clearly illustrates the level of poverty he is living in, that and the fact that he had to use his paper route money to pay his younger siblings a chocolate bar to share for breakfast.

From his chapters we gain the most insight into Eva’s real personality – he tendency to want to carry out increasingly mean ‘dares’, her indecisiveness over their relationship and the volatility that existed between them at times.

His friend Rob was equally repulsive to me with his entitled attitude and his willingness to sell out his friend as long as he wasn’t implicated.

Of course, there are elements of Luke’s story that lead the reader to think that Luke could easily be the culprit – the obsessive nature of their relationship and the fact she had unsuccessfully tried to break up with him several times, his knife being found at the scene and his own admission that they had argued that night. Not to mention the fact that he and his friends are clearly hiding something but what is it?

Did Luke really kill her or are people just quick to blame him because they are prejudice against him because of his social class? You decide.

Our Final Rating...

Mon, 3rd September 2018