Review of Undone by Cat Clarke

Format: eBook (for review)
Genres: contemporary, lgbt,
Pages: 502
Publisher: Quercus
Release Date: 20/12/12
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Jem Halliday is in love with her gay best friend. Not exactly ideal, but she's learning to live with it.

Then the unspeakable happens. Kai is outed online ... and he kills himself.

Jem knows nothing she can say or do will bring him back. But she wants to know who was responsible. And she wants to take them down.

A searing story of love, revenge and betrayal from a bestselling author.

I really liked Kai's voice and found myself wishing on more than one occasion that this was a very different story told from his point of view. He was smart, funny and likeable, three qualities that could not be said for our main character. Jem judges everybody for the tiniest things she can find, she's egotistical, and completely and utterly stupid when it comes to finding out who it was that outed Kai, something I think that most readers had guessed a few pages in.

There was a lot of waiting in between Kai's letters. This book is 500 pages long after all. In this waiting I forced to wander around with Jem while she acted out rubbish versions of some kind of Mean Girls trope, determined to act out her revenge on all the people that she assumes has hurt Kai. While making eyes at the hottest boy in the school. But she hates him. But she wants him. Give me a break.

I was pretty curious about how it would end. I was expecting a  twist to the story, then we could wrap everything up and leave the book feeling happy about the characters and where they would go next. However, I didn't get the ending I was hoping for. I got a mess. Some weird shock ending, with a massive cliffhanger that would never be solved and I was left angry and confused about what would happen to the characters next. But mostly, I wanted to throw the book out of the window and I couldn't because it was an eCopy. Bah.

This problem with the endings doesn't seem to be a new thing. I've previously read two of Cat Clarke's books and I loved her debut but in both I mentioned not liking the ending. It's something that's really put me off reading her books and I know I will be avoiding them in the future, sadly.

Spoilers, highlight to reveal: (I'm also really confused about the cover, which tells us exactly what is going to happen at the end. Whose bright idea was that? It would have made more sense to have a guy in that position, so we would know that it was Kai. Or even, someone androgynous. That would have been clever.)