Book Review: I'm Thinking of Ending Things

I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Ian Reid | Published: 2016

Just so you know, I will be spoiling this book so beware.

This is a terrible book. Maybe I feel that way because the bar was set high. It’s a Shirley Jackson award nominee with a great cover and interesting blurb. I had to wait for months to get it on Overdrive. I was looking forward to this.

So this book is told from a woman’s perspective and it’s done in a terribly shitty manner. The young woman lacks any sort of personality and just seems super bland and like she’s there to stoke the male character’s ego and be a sounding board to his vapid ideas. Behold their deep conversations that are so profound: “Okay, let me ask you a question. Do you think you’re the smartest human alive?” “That’s not an answer. That’s a question.”

“And by the way, this isn’t a very original thought or anything. You know I’m not trying to be brilliant right now, right? We’re just talking.” “We’re communicating,” I say. “We’re thinking.”

sigh

This book is full of contradictions. The couple is driving for the first third of this book. The girl calls it a road trip but they are actually just driving to the boy’s family farm for a dinner. Not to stay the night. That’s not a road trip. He actually has work the next morning. Why would they drive hours each way just to spend 45 minutes for a dinner? And then they go to Dairy Queen?!

They end up at a high school in the middle of nowhere. A school for “about two thousand students.” Where are they bussing these kids in from? I went to a rural school when I was a kid and it was k-12 and there were 800 students and my school was pretty close to a large town.

I really don’t think the author did any sort of homework on how a farm works. Like any. At all. I don’t think he even thought about basic things. Like why people raise livestock. They talk about two pigs that died from old age. Pigs don’t die from old age on farms. There’s only one reason for a pig farm to exist and it’s not to make pig milk, ya donks.

I realize that I’m getting bogged down by dumb details but this book is saturated with dumb little details and they really muddled the story, dammit

So anyway it turns out that I was right about the woman having a bland non-personality — she was a figment of some self-involved whiney man’s imagination of what could have been all along. He was depressed and suicidal and wished that he had talked to that girl more and that it would have turned into something. So it wasn’t an unrealistic lady voice being written by an inept author. It’s the character writing a lady’s voice ineptly. It’s blandladyception. This revelation has no redeeming effect for the story and actually made me hate it worse.

This whole book was written like a pity party for an incompetent narcissist who offed himself. It was trying to be profound in its vagueness but it came off as boring with a whiff of freshman philosophy.

PS: I didn’t even get to the two unnamed characters that were talking about the dead guy or his parents but those parts were awful, too.