After reading the description I was so excited to have the opportunity to read and review this book. I felt that by reading the synopsis it gave away a lot of the main plot points which made me expect that the book would have multiple twists and thrills.

At first I was really bothered by Laura (FMC) because of the way she has been conditioned to view life through a very black and white lens. It’s easy to tell how much she struggles with wanting to live her life her way, while also having to follow the status quo or society's expectations.

Diana embodies the total opposite of Laura’s life. I thought this friendship would be great for Laura. The book does pick up quite the thrill after these two women meet. There were many times throughout where I wasn’t sure who the heck to trust. It made the whole experience pretty exciting. I loved seeing Laura automatically jump into wanting to help and do what is right.

In a lot of ways I do think Laura benefited massively from meeting Diana - she helped her shift her perspective and view herself differently. This unexpected meeting set Laura on a path of self-discovery and taking the time to heal past relationships.

Very repetitive. Not at all mysterious. Boring. I don’t really have much to say. It had a huge buildup and then just… nothing, Also the synopsis of the book kind of gave away the twists.

*The Ends of Things* by Sandra Chwialkowska was such a beautiful, moving read! It’s thoughtful, tender, and so full of heart. I loved the quiet strength of the characters and the way the story explores endings and new beginnings with so much grace. It’s one of those books that makes you pause and reflect, but still leaves you with a warm, hopeful feeling. Absolutely loved it!

I received an arc of this title from NetGalley for an honest review. I could not connect with the characters if this book and in the end didn't finish it.

An interesting story that leads you anywhere, but where you think it actually should go. I enjoyed following it through.

The Ends of Things is a captivatingly mysterious thriller that immediately pulled me into its unsettling atmosphere. If you enjoy psychological thrillers with unreliable narrators, isolated and atmospheric settings, suspenseful mysteries, and stories that delve into the intricacies of female friendships, you'll love this debut novel by Sandra Chwialkowska.

I was interested in the book in the beginning, but then felt it became too predictable. There were a few places I got lost, ironically! I wanted to like it, but it was just ok to me.

Through a series of interconnected narratives, the author delves into the emotional landscapes of her characters, revealing their struggles and triumphs as they confront the endings and beginnings in their lives.

Chwialkowska's prose is beautifully crafted, combining lyrical language with raw honesty. The characters are well-drawn and relatable, each grappling with their own personal demons and the consequences of their choices. The book's structure allows for a rich tapestry of stories that resonate with universal themes of grief and hope.

This book was good for a first novel. It had a really good structure and arc throughout. But I just thought it was a little slow in places and the ending was just okay.

I wanted to love this books so much. Unfortunately, I felt that the synopsis ended up giving away most of the book. I was not engaging reading this. There was not unexpected suspended or twists. I felt as if it was very predictable. I was also slightly confused reading this and had to re-read pages. Overall, I finished the book but it did not capture me. I will not be reviewing on my social media platforms.

📚 ARC BOOK REVIEW 📚

The Ends of Things
By Sandra Chwialkowska
Publication Date: January 14, 2025
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

📚MY RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thank you to Blackstone Publishing for this #gifted book as a part of their #BlackstoneInsiders program, and to NetGalley for this e-ARC, in exchange for my honest review!

📚MY REVIEW:

The Ends Of Things was a mysterious thriller that really pulled me in quickly with its compelling intrigue. There was an unsettling sense of foreboding throughout its pages, and this quick read was one that kept me hooked from cover-to-cover!

The main character, Laura, finally seems to have what everyone else wants: she has a great job as an attorney in New York City, she has a boyfriend Dave, and she finally fits in as a part of a "we" in conversations with her colleagues. Laura and Dave decide to take a tropical vacation together to a luxuriously exclusive couples resort in a remote island in the Bahamas. While there, Laura befriends Diana, who seems a bit out-of-place on her own at the resort. During a hike, Diana suddenly disappears and Laura is terrified that something awful has happened to her. And the mystery takes off from there...

The suspense in this read is filled with my favorite elements of a thriller: a potentially unhinged main character, a sense that everyone is hiding the truth, obsessive tendencies, and an isolated and remote setting. I loved the way the author brought in stories of complicated female friendships, imposter syndrome, and the impact of social media on our insecurities, as threads of the plotline. While this book was suspenseful, I felt like there was some deeper character development as Laura reflected on her past and current life choices. I appreciated Diana's character and the ways she challenged society's norms, a perfect juxtaposition to the engrained beliefs in Laura's mind. The questions surrounding whether Laura was unreliable - or everyone else was - kept my interest as this story unfolded.

This psychological thriller is perfect for you if you love unreliable narrators, isolated and remote settings, suspenseful mystery, and stories that shine a light into the complexities of female friendships. I genuinely enjoyed this debut from Chwialkowska and will be watching and waiting for what she writes next.

#TheEndsOfThings #SandraChwialkowska #BlackstonePublishing #BlackstoneInsiders #NetGalley #NetGalleyReviews #ARCs #thrillerreads #thrilleraddict #thrillerlover #psychologicalthriller #booklover #bookreviews #bookrecs #bookrecommendations

I received a ARC from Netgalley for a honest review. Laura meets Diana on a vacation, and decide to go on a hike together. They get in a argument and Laura goes to the pee and when she is done Diana is gone. Vanished.
She reports to the hotel that she is missing, and Laura's boyfriend is upset because it looks bad on the company that their legal firm represents. He tells her to hold off and wait to report her until they talk to the partners and make a plan...... It had me guessing but the end fizzled for me.

3 stars

I found this story to be interesting at first, but then it kinda of lost its excitement. Maybe this is a case of right book wrong time? TBD.

I have supper mixed feelings about this book. I liked it enough to want to finish 🤷‍♀️ ending was bit flat!

Sandra Chwialkowska’s The Ends of Things is a beautifully haunting exploration of grief, love, and the moments that shape our lives. Her writing is lyrical and evocative, pulling the reader into a world where emotions are raw and every word feels intentional. The way she weaves together different perspectives and timelines creates a deeply immersive experience, making the novel feel both intimate and expansive.

While the prose is stunning and the themes are poignant, the pacing occasionally slows, and some sections feel a bit dense. However, the emotional payoff is absolutely worth it. If you love thought-provoking literary fiction that lingers in your mind long after you turn the last page, this is a book worth picking up.

At the end of this surprisingly deep interrogation of one woman’s adult life and how it’s skidded off the rails so far from where she’d once envisioned it, I burst into tears then contacted my childhood best friend to tell her that I love her.

Like myself and B, Laura Phillips and her best friend Chloe Shipman grew up dreaming of becoming sophisticated jetsetting women. Their friendship eventually fractured, as so many close female bonds unfortunately do in adolescence. Chloe’s thoughts ran to boys, while Laura focused on her studies and, later, career. Now in her thirties and an associate at a prestigious law firm, Laura finds herself still incapable of doing all the things that she wants to, as she’s been conditioned to feel fear and/or shame at the idea of independence, especially as a single woman:

QUOTE
She had dreamed of traveling the world ever since she was a girl but was discouraged by her parents, by her friends, by society itself, it seemed, from traveling alone. Her mother had cautioned her that traveling alone as a woman was dangerous. Threats, she was warned, lurked around every corner. Men could backpack across Europe without fearing unwanted advances or rapes, but not women. Still, Laura yearned to traipse through open-air markets, swim in cerulean waters, and lie under palm trees while drinking colorful cocktails garnished with tropical fruit. [She] yearned to experience the world outside the constraints of a familial or collegiate itinerary.
END QUOTE

But then she starts dating handsome, successful Dave Mitchell, another associate at her firm. When he suggests that they take a couples’ trip to Eleuthera in the Bahamas, she’s both excited and nervous. She’s never really been in a serious relationship before, so she’s not sure how to behave, even as she longs to fully experience finally traveling to one of the many places of which she’s long dreamed.

At first, Eleuthera is everything she imagined and more. The all-inclusive Pink Sands resort they’re staying at is a lover’s paradise… which makes the presence of a single woman traveler there all the more startling. Striking, independent Diana isn’t interested in playing by the unspoken expectations of all the other vacationers, which both intrigues and repels Laura. Laura has always been the quintessential Good Girl, but something about Diana calls to a long suppressed part of her own soul, as the women strike up a tentative friendship.

When Diana suddenly disappears, Laura doesn’t know what to do. Dave thinks she’s overreacting, but Laura knows that something is deeply amiss. She’s determined to do everything possible to find Diana again, fueled partly by her own troubled history with female friends:

QUOTE
To Laura, her friendship with Chloe became a cautionary tale of the frightening fate that could befall a pair of binary stars, who, by orbiting each other too closely, collapsed into each other. In time, she learned to keep everyone she met safely at arm’s length, never allowing herself to fall into anyone’s orbit and never letting anyone get close enough to enter hers.

But with Diana, she had felt the electric hope of meeting someone with whom she could share a profound connection. Only now, Diana was most likely gone forever, murdered or lost at the bottom of the sea, her body entangled in the undulating tentacles of a coral reef.
END QUOTE

With a tropical storm bearing down on Eleuthera, Laura suddenly finds herself in the disorienting position of being the prime suspect in Diana’s disappearance. Soon, she’ll have to risk everything to uncover the truth and save her friend. But is Laura herself truly as innocent as she seems?

Sandra Chwialkowska’s debut novel is a powerful re-examination of tropical getaway tropes, as well as of the many ways that women are taught both to limit themselves and to distrust one another. Laura is a flawed protagonist whose sanity often feels like it’s teetering on a knife edge. I spent so much of this book feeling either impatient with or deeply concerned about her, as she refuses to think about things that she considers too painful, choosing instead to hobble herself in the way that so many modern women unfortunately still do, with the resulting ugliness that pours out when she inevitably loses control. The lessons that Laura learns are hard, and I genuinely worried that Ms Chwialkowska wouldn’t stick the landing. She does, though, with a luminous, moving ending that makes The Ends Of Things the best book I’ve read of 2025 so far.

This book started off with a bang, with a mysterious woman on a remote island, and had all the makings of a suspensful thriller. About halfway through the book, it started to really slow down. The storyline felt repetitive, and the plot got a bit boring.

Disappointing. I didn't like the characters and the mystery wasn't really a mystery. I get what it was going for but didn't feel like it worked for me.

Yet another thriller I could not put down. This one centers on Laura, an attorney who has always had a fear of travelling alone who decides to take a last minute trip to the Bahamas with her newish boyfriend Dave. Once on the island, Laura becomes intrigued by a single woman at the same resort and she wants to get to know her better. Laura strikes up a conversation with the woman. What happens afterwards changes Laura's life in ways she could never have imagined.

I would have to say I would have liked more mystery to this book but overall it was good. I feel like it was lacking in a sense and there wasn't enough drama. I would definitely recommend the book to others and my followers and will look out for other books by this author.

The Ends of Things a is a beautifully written, introspective novel that explores themes of loss, grief, and self-discovery. The prose is poetic and reflective, drawing you into the emotional journey . While the pacing is slower, the deep character development and emotional depth make it a rewarding read. It’s not a light story, but it’s poignant and thought-provoking. A solid 4 stars—emotionally and beautifully crafted.