How It Ends by Catherine Lo (review)

In sophomore year, Jessie still suffers with depression and anxiety issues that require medication after her junior-high bullying. Annie has a stepmother-shaped chip on her shoulder and finds the cool masks of the mean girls at her new school to be irritating phoniness. She and Jessie become fast friends, with Annie enjoying Jessie’s goofy but loving parents as much as Jessie herself. As the year wears on, however, the A-list girls decide to open their ranks to Annie, and Annie naïvely thinks she can effect a rapprochement between Jessie and her former tormentors. There are no real villains here, as Lo creates nuanced characters whose intentions are always credibly motivated. Jessie’s mom, for instance, violates Jessie’s privacy by telling Annie about Jessie’s mental health challenges, and Annie’s decision to share that information in order to encourage empathy among her friends is a disaster; Jessie’s hints to Annie’s boyfriend about Annie’s pregnancy result in turmoil, including an abortion that Annie hadn’t yet made up her mind about. The argument that plays out between Jessie’s parents over her mental health is fist-pumpingly insightful as her dad reams her mother out for visiting her own unresolved issues on their daughter, but so is Jessie’s mother’s insistence that it’s her job to interfere when she suspects that Jessie might be abusing her medication. The plot thus spirals rather than arcs, as Jessie and Annie work back, forth, and around pain, forgiveness, mistakes, selfawareness, anger, betrayal, and heartache until they finally break through to the tenacity of a friendship worth keeping.