Book Review: The Bitter End by Alexa Donne

Eight disgruntled Warner Prep students are on their way from their Los Angeles homes to a remote Colorado ski retreat for a digital detox. This trip was almost none of their first choices for their high school’s annual Senior Excursion. Their chaperone, the tough but respected school counselor Ms. Silva, is adamant that this will be good for them though:

“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.

While the narrator in that chapter is Willa Hawley, her thoughts could apply to pretty much everyone else in their group. Willa herself isn’t really part of the other students’ world of wealth and privilege. The daughter of one of Warner Prep’s teachers, she’s used to being bumped from more desirable activities due to the peremptory natures (and deep pockets) of her classmates’ parents. 

At least she’s not the least popular person on this trip. Hard-ass chaperone aside, that dubious honor goes to Piper Giambruno, the injured gymnast who is viewed by the other students as both a liar and a narc. Willa is at least allowed to hang out in the orbit of the other popular kids with minimal blowback, so long as she does what they tell her.

In keeping with her contrarian reputation, Piper actually signed up for this excursion, though finds herself rapidly regretting it as the trip progresses. The competitive gymnast has been plagued with injuries that have derailed her Olympic career, a fact that’s constantly thrown in her face by Camille Sutter, her archnemesis on the mat and in school. Neither girl is thrilled to be stuck in close proximity to one another, given their long history of animosity and the resentment already simmering under the group’s surface.

For all their chaperone’s best attempts at encouraging her charges to center themselves and really think about their futures – including by taking away all their electronic devices – the students quickly figure out how to circumvent her, and start on the inevitable drunken party games after she falls asleep. Given the scheming, back-biting nature of almost all of the kids involved though, the shenanigans soon take a cruel turn:

Whatever this is, it isn’t working. Piper is neither ashamed by not drinking, nor is she drinking with shame. We’re getting drunk, sure, but no one’s having fun.

 

Camille goes for the big guns. “Never have I ever done drugs.”

 

Something ripples through the air. A current shifting. A rip in time, transporting us to the night three years ago. Snow flicks against the glass, and the fire crackles, almost analogous to deep bass vibrating the walls, the chatter of partygoers downstairs. That night and this night, colliding.

 

I’ll never forget that party and what it cost me.

Memories of that party cast a long shadow, souring the trip even before one of the teenagers is found dead the next morning. Was it a tragic accident, or had someone set the victim up for a terrible demise? When more people start dying, the surviving students will have to accept that there’s a killer in their midst. Will they be able to figure out who it is and why, and stop the murderer from successfully preying on the rest of them too?

I do enjoy a juicy closed circle (or, as I like to think of them, isolated manor house) mystery. All of the kids have awful secrets festering behind their glossy, carefully curated facades. While it’s easy to blame social media for fueling young people’s obsessions with image, Alexa Donne makes it clear that their pressures are almost all spawned by parents who enable, if not outright encourage, questionable behavior.

I also appreciated how she exploded one of my least favorite tropes at the end of the novel: the “grateful to be the consolation prize” girl. Adolescence is a tough time for most people, and Ms. Donne explores the murderous consequences of too much pressure on the young with aplomb, both in the main plot and in the book’s ominous denouement.