We Begin At The End - Chris Whitaker

Fiction

Rating: 10/10

This is a story of how tragedy seeps into a small town and lingers like a poison for generations.  It is a story of actions and their consequences, of love and loss, of sadness and sorrow, of bad choices and second chances and of remorse and regrets, revenge and redemption. It is also a love story, a story of hope and selflessness and compassion. It’s about people haunted by the certainty that they will leave no mark on the world, as if they never existed in the first place.

Bookended by mysterious deaths, the beating heart of this novel is without question its lead characters. Walk, a forty something Sheriff hanging on for dear life to a past that may have only existed in his imagination and Duchess, a foul-mouthed, fierce and furious thirteen-year-old that refuses to cower from the misery’s life has seen fit to throw at her.  The author imbues them with such longing for a life outside their grasp that your heart will lay torn and tattered on their behalf.

Not all stories are easy ones.  Not all endings are happy.  Life isn’t fair or kind to all. It won’t give you what you deserve. It doesn’t even the scales between good times and bad.  For some, certainly for those in this book, it piles on more than a fair share.

There is nothing I can say that will do this book justice, no grouping of words that can embody how I felt at its conclusion. This is a staggeringly beautiful and powerful story; it will imbed itself in you, it will linger long after the final page is turned, and it will break you a little.  If you are lucky.  If you allow it to.