Review by Elita Menezes
Random House Books for Young Readers,
October 15, 2024
352 pages, hardcover, $26.99 CAD,
9780593651063
Ages 14+
Thriller, Fiction
“This weekend is about stepping back and reflecting. Your generation is so used to being watched. Every move monitored by your teachers, your parents, your publicists” —she nods to Eden— “your peers, your coaches, or even yourselves as you curate your perfect images in person and online. This weekend you’re stuck with me, but in a few months you will graduate and enter the world, and you will have no chaperones at all. I challenge you to take a cold, hard look at who you are and who you want to be. Because so far, I’m not sure I am impressed with what I see.”
A chill fills the air.
My plans for this weekend are front of mind.
I know exactly who I’d be, unseen and consequence-free.
Not a good person at all.
When a group of prep school students with a sordid past are snowed-in together on a mountain, it’s a given that distress and drama will likely ensue. Murder, however, might be a surprising oversight.
The Bitter End by Alexa Donne features eight reluctant high schoolers on a “digital detox” senior trip at a ski chalet. Most of them are rich and spoiled, some of them are on the rise to fame, and a few are just regular students trying to get to graduation, making for a varied and dynamic cast. The book starts with a ride up to the chalet, establishing allyships and rivalries between characters, and hinting at a messy history between them all.
They soon find out that while each character wanted to go on different senior trips, one of them requested they all be on this one for an unknown reason, thus marking the first mystery of their tumultuous weekend. The real story begins when a body appears the morning after a tense first night, and the mountain trip goes downhill from there.
The book is spliced with flashbacks from a party three years prior told in third-person POV, while the main narrative is delivered in a first-person perspective from Piper, Willa and Delaney, who seem to be the most ordinary and observant people in the book. Narrating from three rotating characters achieves a surprisingly comprehensive portrayal of everyone; it can be tough to include that many characters without leaving some to the wayside, but Donne’s strategy and skill yielded no confusion or lack of necessary information. The interjection of moments from the past also built suspense, broke up the potential monotony of a weekend-long, single-location story and allowed for more character expansion outside of the three main perspectives. I was constantly intrigued as pieces of the characters’ history were revealed, deepening the story as the trip went on in the present day.
As masterfully as Donne balances information about the characters, I wished to see more satisfying character arcs in the book. I felt the characters should have been challenged more personally, on a level deeper than the environmental and deadly conflicts they all naturally face in a murder mystery plot. The book generally lacked confrontation between characters and their flaws, which is key to their development, positive or negative. There was great pre-developed interpersonal tension, notably in the ex-friendship dynamic between Willa and Delaney and the competition between Camille and Piper, but I think the built tension was underutilized, as the simmering conflict between them hardly crescendos in a way that impacts the characters’ personalities, dynamics or values.
Donne describes the book as a take on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, with characters who “ring familiar in the influencer era” and while I can see that, sometimes, the dialogue and actions of the characters felt over exaggerated in an attempt to capture modern adolescence, which occasionally took me out of the story. Even so, many moments were incredibly authentic to the teen experience — the awkwardness, passive aggression, and petty competition were fairly realistic.
Even with certain flaws in dialogue and character development, I find myself wanting to reread The Bitter End for clues to its many twists as the book leaves loose ends that I still wonder about. The story is perfect for those who enjoy teen drama with deadly twists at every corner. It is a difficult task to create a surprising story when readers go into it knowing not to trust anyone, but Donne builds a mystery full of secrets and betrayal, making it a nail-biter until its bitter end.
Elita Menezes is a student in the Faculty of Arts at UBC. She works as an editor and loves experiencing stories in any way she can. Some of her favourite pastimes include laughing at bad movies with her friends and (thinking about) writing.
YOUNG ADULTING 