I'm Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid - book review

I'm Thinking of Ending Things 

By Iain Reid 

Genres: psychological thriller, 2022-read, philosophy, psyche, mystery, mental illness 

Rating 5/5 ☺☺☺

Terrific. Eerie and ominous. A quick and short read but with a lasting impact. This book is a 2006  debut novel from a Canadian author Iain Reid and he makes a definitive mark with this one. Without giving away the secret/twist in the story,  this is a play of psychological guessing game on the reader till the very end. What the narrator is actually describing is not fully grasped/understood without the full context at the end. Ofcourse there are hints all through but they don't strike home the message. 

Getting into the plot, Jake is a student in the preparation to become a professor. He meets a young woman at a pub and they begin connecting. While he is tall and wiry in frame, she is short and a bit roundish - contrasting him. They are both introverted, shy and non social people wishing not to talk or interact with others and entirely keeping to their own private worlds. As their relationship is growing in time and closeness with lot of talking and spending time with each other, Jake proposes her to visit his parents at his family farm. They make a couple of hour car ride to the place and he shows her around. They see the decrepit and mottled small house where his parents are currently staying on a farm with a barn of sheep, a coop of hens and pen that once held robust pigs. 

She senses an undercurrent of forced love and likeability in the parents - the mother always smiling and the father holding himself off in a reserved dignity. She learns that the mother has a certain mental illness which causes her to pull off her hair, paint really weird and scary pictures, smile too much till her face hurts. All this time, the lover has been planning and contemplating on ending things with Jake. She couldn't bring herself to actually do it because she couldn't find a solid reason to do so. Now after meeting his eerie family, she makes up her mind. They start off from the place and enroute Jake takes her to a desolate school in the neighborhood which is situated out of nowhere. He abandons her and runs off after a man he sees and she enters the school. She gets trapped.. trapped with no escape..and spends an enormous amount of time in this captivity to learn what? Or what does the reader learn?

 It is scary and frightful in the sense makes one wonder what Jake might be upto? Has he deliberately put the woman at risk for the sake of some twisted desire? Words and actions can be faked but only thoughts are real  - but what if thoughts can also be faked?? What's going on within someone's head - who knows and how can we access that space? And how can anyone handle too much loneliness - how does psyche handle the situations where someone has to go through extremes of being alone and lonely, dealing with everything by themself?? Its a very gripping book - a real page turner - that had me hooked till the end. I sat up through the night to finish it. Even though its a small book - its power lies in retrospectively understanding what's happening / what happened.  :)