End Over End

Even though this book start's with a girl's disappearance and ends with a murder trial, it's not really a mystery. Instead, it's a peek into the lives and thoughts of dozens of characters in one small town. Each character is treated with respect, even when they don't respect themselves. With many short chapters, End Over End is a quick read, but it will resonate with you long afterward.

This book, which is built around the murder of a 14-yr. old girl, is remarkable. The short chapter approach, which navigates unpredictably among numerous points of view, kept me interested and tense and expectantly galloping forward. The effect of the many points of view was prismatic, and allowed me to experience the story in its many facets. The characters are portrayed with compassion, the imagined details of their lives making them seem familiar: like family, like neighbors, like ourselves. The way the author weaves the characters together through and around the death of this young woman reminded me of the interconnectedness of all lives. The fact that we are left to decide for ourselves "whodunit" brings us face-to-face with the elusiveness of truth--a humbling, even painful, experience. Also challenging is having to decide what and who is truly evil, since the writer delivers the characters to us in true-to-life complexity. Readers of this book who hear news stories or read newspaper accounts of tragedies similar to the one protrayed in this book will find it more difficult to jump to conclusions about "whodunit," or make assumptions about the people involved. For making us more compassionate, challenging us to think for ourselves, and all the while entertaining us with a well-paced and well-written book, Kennedy deserves our gratitude, and our congratulations for a first-rate accomplishment.

Kate Kennedy fills this whodounit with enough steam to heat a Russian bath house in January. Best of all, try to guess the surprise ending. I didn't. Maybe you will. But I wouldn't bet on it.This girl can write! A must read on the beach this summer. Just don't let your young children near it. Parental guidance advised. Hot!

There are some books that tap into an under used vein of human compassion. Such a book is Kate Kennedy's "End Over End". Set in rural New England, the book traces the multi-layered, intersecting lives of a community caught in the net of a small town tragedy. Ivory Towle, a fourteen year old girl is murdered, her body found months later by town boys walking their dog behind a neighbor's farm. In this carefully woven story, Kate Kennedy realizes the lives of people often overlooked, threading the needle and drawing each image perfectly through the eye. You see Ivory, rebellious, dreamy caught in a growing-up-too-fast world yearning for Blake, the boy she's forbidden to see. Here are the teenagers gathering at the gravel pit lit with car headlights, listening to heavy metal or country, radios blasting, stoned and plenty more where that came from. You meet the parents as driven and lost in their way as their kids, trying to keep it together in tiny ranch homes or trailers, doing shift work, their dreams cinched by the mill or the factory. You meet everyone in town who has been touched by this event in staccato chapters that pile up images, dialogue, detective detail all toward the final resolution refusing to leave any stone unturned as the crime is sifted through the eyes of everyone it touches, victims and slayers alike. Though this book is set in rural New England, it is any small town where the roads peter out to mailboxes, where the kids have a gravel pit or Spangler's Store to hang out in and grab a bus to school and think maybe a high school diploma will be their ticket out and, if not, marriage and babies and now the boys don't even have the draft anymore to make men of them. In "End Over End" Kate Kennedy has revealed an Our Town every bit as dense and accurate as Wilder's. Here are the mothers, fathers and children as well as the teachers, the lawyers, the police, the undertaker, the newspaper man. Each has a voice and a claim on the world before us and each is given time center stage. If you need good guys and bad guys with the case neatly packaged and solved, this is probably not the book for you. But, if you want to finish a final page and have the very last scene, indeed, the very last word swim before your eyes like the after image of a compelling dream, then, by all means, this is the book for you.