đź“š Goodreads review: The Ending Writes Itself, by Evelyn Clarke
My 4/5 stars review:
If I got it right, V. E. Schwab & Cat Clarke are both fantasy and YA writers, which, in my view, is pure shite. Through collaboration, though, and under the pen name Evelyn Clarke, they wrote a crime thriller (or is mystery thriller a better classification?) whose only connection to YA crap is the presence of some representatives of these fields among the six authors. Moreover, “The Ending Writes Itself” is unique in that its first half is brilliantly written and engaging, despite being unoriginal by some counts, while the second half is catastrophic. Rarely have I seen such a mess: from all possible continuations, they chose the weirdest possible sequence of events. That, surely enough, means that the solution to this whodunnit might surprise a good deal of readers. But there’s more: the mystery is essentially solved around 87-88% into the book, which makes the remaining 12-13% (an eighth!) an almost boring, unnecessarily long closure (“too much water over too little tea”).
Coming from two writers of garbage (I had to ask Gemini what Young Adult fiction really is), this novel is a huge feat, hence the 4/5 rating which, honestly, isn’t entirely deserved. But I was enraptured by the first half and by the writing style itself. Not that it was flawless. For instance, using “solve” as a noun is non-standard (“She doesn’t have a solve for the ending,” “she doesn’t have a solve, not yet,” “he spits out every solve that comes to mind”), but I’m nitpicking.
As with most crime mysteries I read, I have objections to the intrinsic logic of some of the protagonists’ actions, and a couple of unlikely but providential events take place; without them, the entire scaffolding couldn’t hold. I won’t name them to avoid spoilers.
Obviously, nothing is useless in the narrative (Chekhov’s gun was invoked at some point). I’m not sure that a MacGuffin exists because, without rereading the first chapters, I couldn’t tell if a trivial detail escaped me. I have the feeling that it did.
In the first half of the narration, a couple of characters became relatable and likeable, while another small set were almost repugnant. In the second part, my liking for people started to shrink. But throughout the book, I was completely pissed-off by the visible lack of responsibility, almost an insouciance, manifested by most of the six “midlist authors” about their task: they mostly considered and pondered and talked about writing, but it was all talk and no action.
The worst offender of common sense, though, is the safe set to open after exactly 72 hours. I understand deadlines, but this was an editorial deadline that still implied extra time to evaluate the six contributions, and there’s no way to tell how long that stage would take. Instead of 72 hours to the second, the deadline would have been more logical if it matched a specific day and hour when the editor was supposed to leave the island. Even more absurd is the choice of a safe that, once closed, cannot be opened no matter what because nobody knows the combination. About half a dozen incongruous, irrational elements almost ruined the entire construct, as they were crucial to the story, yet absurd.
As for who killed who, any killer needs a motive, but they also need to know that they’d be able to implement their plan. In this case, I’m not entirely persuaded that the evil character could have anticipated that they could adapt and improvise to reach their goal. As for the goal itself, it’s still a mystery. It’s like the two authors have decided who kills who and even found some motivation, but they didn’t go through with the logic: can an ending really write itself? The final chapters provide an artificial answer to this question. Or rather, because the assassin’s purpose wasn’t to end a book: OK, you killed; now what?
All in all, with all my criticisms, I found the characters and the tension between them reasonably well developed, which was rather unexpected from writers of fantasy and YA nonsense. Maybe next time they’ll come up with a more sensible plot.
I hated this one, but it wasn’t that bad.