Undone

by Cat Clarke

Real, compulsive and intense: Cat Clarke is the queen of emotional suspense. For fans of Paula Hawkins, Gillian Flynn, Megan Abbott and Jandy Nelson.

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.

• ISBN10: 1780870450
• ISBN13: 9781780870458
• Publish Date: 4 May 2017 (first published 1 January 2014)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Hachette Children's Group
• Imprint: Quercus Children's Books
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 352
• Language: English

Reviews

[Angie]

Undone was pretty intense. Jem and Kai have been best friends forever. Other than his family, Jem is the only person who knows Kai is gay. At least until someone mass e-mails a video of Kai with a mystery guy to the whole school. A few days later, Kai jumped off a bridge. Now, Jem is understandably devastated, and she doesn't want to live in world without Kai. But then his sister delivers a reason to keep her going for at least another year.

It did take me a bit to get into Undone, mostly because Jem was hard to warm up to. I didn't quite believe that she was in love with Kai, especially knowing that he was gay. But I do believe in the power of their friendship. Jem is also extremely judgmental of the popular crowd. She's basically invisible, and no one knows who she is until after Kai's death, but even then she's just know as that dead gay kid's best friend. Certainly not much better. But her judgements are part of the journey. Kai left her a series of letters, and he tells her to be more open to people, which she does.

The main plot of Undone is Jem exacting revenge on those who did this to her best friend. Her plan is to get in with those popular kids, ruin them, then take her own life. That is a very dark plot, and not something I have come across before. I really enjoyed it though. I loved seeing Jem change as she gets deeper into the plan. Things do not go the way she expects at all after spending a year with these kids who she'd never even considered talking to before. The only thing that kept me from totally loving it though, was that I figured out who sent out the video and who the mystery guy was right away.

Undone was great. I've never encountered anything like this before. Those last several chapters are fantastic! Knowing who really did it didn't stop me from being shocked at everything else that was going on. Then that ending? Geez. I honestly didn't expect it to turn out that way.

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.

[Bianca]

It's amazing, the lies you can tell yourself. Even more amazing, the lies you can believe when you're desperate enough.

*reread*
— I gave this book 5 stars the first time around, maybe I shouldn’t have reread this and ruined my memory of it. It wasn’t as great as I remember it. But that ending is still as haunting as ever so I’ll give it that.

[Leah]

This was a mind-bending read! I read Cat's debut novel Entangled when it was released years ago and it left me in a perpetual state of confusion - the ending left too many questions!!!!! But it was a very good book. I've had Undone sitting on my shelf since 2013 (apparently), and I've finally gotten around to reading it.

I love books about revenge. There's just something so amazing about seeing someone enact their revenge, especially when they become friends with the very people they're trying to destroy. And that's where Jem finds herself, after her best friend Kai kills himself after being outed online. She's angry, she feels like she can't go on, until she realises she needs to find out who was the culprit behind the outing and she can make them pay.

The hardest part of understanding Jem's revenge plot was the very simple fact that I actually grew to like the people she was trying to pull down. Sasha seemed LOVELY. Lucas was a delight. Even Bugs had his moments. The only person I didn't ever really connect with was Stu, who just seemed horrible and irredeemable (but not for the reasons you think).

Jem probably wasn't my favourite ever female MC. She's holding a lot of rage, and grief, and anger, and it very much warps her mind a little bit, but on the other hand, you can understand why she feels the need to get revenge, because this was her best friend. Regardless of whether her revenge would bring Kai back (it obviously wouldn't), wouldn't anyone else do the same for their friend? If your friend killed themselves because of someone else's horrible meanness, wouldn't you want to know who it was and punish them? Because of that, I totally understood her reasonings. I'm not saying I agree, by any means, and some of her methods were a bit suspect, but I could see her state of mind and see how that had affected how she viewed things.

This was such an intense read, from start to finish. Probably my only issue with the novel was the ending. It was exactly what I expected, but I actually wanted a very different ending. I wanted consequences, and Jem having to deal with the things she had done. Especially because I knew who was behind the video from the very beginning. Now it wasn't a bad ending, it was just sad and it made me want to cry. Cat Clarke is a super talented writer, and I look forward to diving into all of her other books soon. They don't half pack an emotional punch.

[Jo]

Originally posted on Once Upon a Bookcase.

I'm a big fan of Cat Clarke, so I was super excited to read Undone, though I was worried about how heavy and depressing it would be, being about suicide. Undone does have it's moments, but it's brilliant!

When a video of Kai is put online, outing his sexuality, he kills himself. Jem, his best friend is distraught. Not only is he her best friend, but she's in love with him, and the loss is more than she can bear. The only thing that is keeping her going is working out who outed Kai, and making them pay.

Kai commits suicide before the book starts, but we actually get to know Kai through Jem telling us about the past. We get to see how they met, and their whole childhood together, and the events that lead up to his death, so we get a real idea of who Kai is. At the very beginning I was reminded of the novel Good Girls by Laura Ruby, as both books deal with the same ideas, except in Good Girls, the main character is a straight female and doesn't commit suicide. As the book progressed, I was reminded of P.S. I Love You by Celia Ahern, as, before he kills himself, Kai writes letters to Jem, delivered after, to read each month for a year. Some of the letters are sweet, and some depressing. You get a real idea for how much Kai loved Jem - platonically - but also how much he's hurting from having everyone know he's gay, without him having any control over it. I was originally a little surprised at how quickly after the incident Kai commited suicide, not seeming to want to even try facing people and seeing if he could get through it, but Clake was inspired to write Undone by the Tyler Clementi case, who committed suicide shortly after internet bullies watched him with another man on webcam, so I understand it a little more now.

I didn't particularly warm to Jem, but Undone is one of those books where you don't have to like the main character to really enjoy the book. I didn't dislike Jem, I just didn't love her. Despite not being her biggest fan, I still had moments of sympathy for her, of relating to her, of respecting her, and of cheering her on. The cheering her on aspect might seem a little weird; the things Jem does to get her own back are quite severe, and I would be quite shocked and disturbed by her actions. Yet at the time of reading, I had just lost a friend of my own. It was for completely different reasons0, but the feeling that their gone and there's nothing you can do is just awful. Jem could do something - get revenge. It was all rooted in anger, despair and grief, and really wasn't the most healthy thing for her to do, yet I could completely understand, and because she could, I wanted her too, and was egging her on in my head.

Yet, as I said, there were things she did that were just unsettling and uncomfortable to me. Plus I had several theories, and if I was right, oooh, things were going to be bad. My theories were right, but in a surprising way, like "Oh, I hope it's not going to turn out that....", but didn't actually think that would be the way things turned out. So I was surprised when I turned out I Was right, and my heart just sank. It hurt to be right. It was just so awful. I was all teary, for more than one person, for the whole situation, and ugh, it was just so, so sad. And Jem is the cause of her own downfall, I think. She's so judgemental, and everything is black and white, she can't bring herself to see things differently, and she's like this even before Kai's death. For example, popular people are to be hated because, as they're popular, they're shallow and stupid and up themselves. Well, actually, maybe they're not? But she can't take a step back and look at things from a different angle. I believe it's this way of viewing things and people that ultimately causes all her problems.

Because most of the book is all about Jem's grief and her revenge, there isn't a huge discussion about sexuality, but throughout the novel you're completely aware that it's all about sexuality - Kai is dead, and he's dead because he committed suicide after an online homophobic attack. You're constantly aware of this, even if sexuality isn't brought up all that often. When it does come up, it's mostly in Kai's letters, with his thoughts on life because of his sexuality and after the online bullying.

"It's too hard. It's all too hard. It's not just the video. Jem, I don't think I could ever be happy in this world - a world where people are ashamed to admit who they really are.
I know what you're thinking, but I'm not ashamed of who I am. I happen to think I'm a fairly decent human being all things considered... But that's not enough to keep me going. And you're not enough....What it comes down to is the fact that I'm not strong enough to be here anymore." (p187-188)

"You know what I wish? I wish more than anything that I wasn't gay. It's not as easy as I made it look you know. There are things I never told Everything's so much easier for you straight people. The world is set up to work in your favour and you don't even appreciate it." (p302) 

The other hard-hitting comment on sexuality comes from Jem, wishing things could be different, and wishes that they lived in a world where sexual orientation was such a non-issue, there wouldn't be any problem. Kai would never have been bullied, and he wouldn't have committed suicide.

"Kai and I would be living in a world where nobody cared about your sexual orientation. Being gay wouldn't be gossiped about or frowned upon - it wouldn't even be worth mentioning. It would just be a fact. A mundane sort of fact." (p488)

And really, isn't that what we all want?

Undone is an awesome novel; it's tragic, it's powerful, and it really tugs at your heartstrings. The ending is just so unexpected, and completely knocked me for six. So heart-wrenching! I feel there is potential for a companion novel about one of the other characters in the book after the ending, a completely different story with different themes and issues. I wonder if Clarke would write it. Either way, I'm most definitely a huge Cat Clarke fan, and I am so excited for whatever she has for us next!

Thank you to Quercus for sending me a proof.