the end of everything megan abbott review

We spend so much of our lives wearing masks and performing in some ways and measuring our responses I get the feeling, the places I like are where all the masks are off.”įor her latest novel, Abbott read science memoirs and biographies as well as interviewing scientists. They’re kind of hothouses, I guess, and no one’s measuring themselves. I approach it almost anthropologically at the start, but then I get very fascinated at the extremes of emotions. Those settings, they seem to bring out the strangeness of people. “I don’t plan on it, I just seem to end up there. “I’m really interested in insular subcultures, that’s my weird speciality,” Abbott agrees. One secret in particular will reverberate into adulthood, keeping them locked in an ongoing competitive relationship that has far-reaching repercussions, deep in the world of science-research laboratories.

In Give Me Your Hand, two girls, Kit and Diane, initially bond over a Marie Curie quote and cross-country running, and then over secrets, teenager-style. As Abbott has shifted smoothly from her noir and hard-boiled novelistic beginnings, she’s beguiled readers into insular bubble-worlds of suburban and small-town America-specifically into the hearts and minds of teenage girls and their families- where shared interests such as cheerleading, gymnastics, and even mass hysteria are what bind communities together, for better and for worse.

Her most recent novels, from 2011’s The End of Everything to this year’s Give Me Your Hand, dance tantalizingly on the edge of psychological thriller territory, but inhabit an unsettling ground all their own. One of the joys of reading a book by Megan Abbott lies in the witchy spell she casts over you as a reader.

The end of everything megan abbott review