This Is How We Change The Ending
Vikki Wakefield
This Is How We Change The Ending
Vikki Wakefield
Winner of the CBCA Book of the Year Award for Older Readers 2020
Sixteen-year-old Nate McKee is doing his best to be invisible. He’s worried about a lot of things-how his dad treats Nance and his twin half-brothers; the hydro crop growing in his bedroom; the way his friend Merrick always drags him into fights. And he has never forgiven his mother for leaving.
But none of it is his fight, right? He’s just waiting for his time. Nate hangs out at YouthWorks, the local youth centre threatened with closure, and fills his notebooks with the things he can’t say. But when some of his pages are stolen and his words are graffitied on the wall of the centre, Nate realises he has allies. He might be able to make a difference, change his life, and claim his future. Or can he?
This is How We Change the Ending is a story that will have you on the edge of your seat, hoping Nate will find a way out, despite the odds.
Review
Jackie Tang
Nate is stuck in a loop: go to school; go to the youth centre with his loudmouth best mate, Merrick; go home to his aggressive dad Dec, Dec’s new wife Nance and their three-year-old twin boys; lather, rinse, repeat. Nate is a worrier, concerned with the big things (climate change, inheriting Dec’s genes) and the small (the latest assignment from his Dead Poets Society-inspired English teacher). But when Nate’s haven, the youth centre, risks shutting down, asense of rebellion starts to take form.
With This Is How We Change the Ending, Vikki Wakefield crafts an examination of violence, stunted masculinity and class disparity that’s as complex as any literary novel but made more immediate through its intensely personal first person narration. Your heart breaks for Nate as he stubbornly refuses to hope, for fear of disappointment, even as you root for him to break the cycle. In much of YA literature, that in-between stage of late adolescence is about the wideningof potential, but here, the all-too-real fear of opportunities closing to you as financial reality hits is ever present. Leavened by Nate’s wry wit and soulful insights, however, this never comes across as hopeless or grim – just honest.
With its emotional realism, This Is How We Change the Ending feels like an Australian Friday Night Lights: the hazy washed-out glare of a small town, the slightly aimlesswandering nights, and the ultimately uplifting message. I’m not sure what we did right to deserve a writer as fine as Wakefield, who captures the bruised vulnerability and tremulous potential of youth with so much honesty and power. Those who had their hearts wrenched by her previous books, Friday Brown and Inbetween Days, should prepare themselves for another spin through the emotional wringer. For ages 15+.
Jackie Tang is the digital marketing manager.
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