I accidentally read a Wakefield novel last week. At a school library placement, I grabbed a book from the shelf for company during my lunch break. It was Ballad for a Mad Girl. And I was hooked from the start. The buzz is that Wakefield’s latest book, This is How We Change the Ending, is even better.

Nate McKee is 16. The way things are going, he might not make 17. He lives in a house where fear rules, where a punch is more likely than a hot breakfast – or any sort of breakfast, actually. His three-year-old half brothers are learning the hard way that it’s best not to provoke their father, Dec. And his step-mum Nance, only eight years older, is caught in the middle and keeps coming back for more.

The only place Nate feels semi-normal is the local youth centre. He hangs out there – hides there – with his best mate, Merrick, who has his own easy-with-the-fists father.

“Merrick’s almost seventeen, six months older than me (though he doesn’t act like it), and he thinks about sex all the time — about doing it, about watching others do it, about not having someone to do it with. Somehow he does this without mentioning that he’s never actually done it. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I couldn’t. I have no privacy. I can’t even take a piss without someone knowing.”

Nate, This is How We Change the Ending

‘A nothing age’

The book navigates Nate’s life of poverty, of family violence in a way that’s both heartbreakingly matter-of-fact and just plain heartbreaking. Nate’s philosophy that it’s better just to give up from the very start so you don’t get kicked in the guts down the track is hard to stomach.

Wakefield’s sentences are stunning. There’s an easy flow to the prose that draws you in and keeps you wanting more.

“My notebooks are like my own private well and my words are like stones: I drop them in the well so I don’t have to carry them around. I need the well. It keeps me from self-destructing.”

How to fight back

In the end, This is How We Change the Ending is a story about how to fight back, even when the odds are against you and everything seems pointless. It’s a story about finding hope where none exists and how to keep going when some days you’d rather not. It’s a story every angsty teen needs.

Think you might like it? You can read a sneaky chapter or two over at Text Publishing – and I recommend you do just that.

This is How We Change the Ending

by Vicki Wakefield

Publisher: Text Publishing

Recommended for: 14 years and up

ISBN: 9781922268136

RRP: $19.99

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