Book Review: The Ends Of Things by Sandra Chwialkowska

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:

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.

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:

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.

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.