Don't Tell Me How It Ends by Craig McLay

3.5 stars

Andrew MacLennan is an aspiring film maker and he has always wanted to attend the prestigious Toronto School Of Film.  The only thing is he has never lived away from home before, he has never had a girlfriend and he has definitely, never, ever experienced intimacy.  Well, he doesn't think he has.  You see, his twin brother was killed in a car accident when they were 15 and the last 10 years are all a bit patchy, memory wise.

This novel deals with his first year at the film school and it is all a bit Seinfeld in that really the book appears to be about nothing more than the mundanities of life.  Approximately three quarters of the way through this changes and it does reveal much more about our narrator and his past and how that is affecting his present and future.  By this point you are sort of on board with things and idly hoping things work out for him but you aren't really invested.

The characters are solid and a good mix of personality types and they are very racially diverse.  This doesn't feel like a deliberate ploy by the author but more a genuine realisation of the disparate groups of people that are thrown together in University and the randomness of the friend groups that spring up.  The humour is warm and we are laughing with the boys (Andrew, Edgar, Esteban and Satyajit) rather than at them as they try and negotiate the demands of their course, moving off campus and having love lives.

To be honest, I found the Nira / Andrew romantic relationship very uncomfortable; they just didn't feel like a fit and it all seemed to be a device just to allow the reader to peek in to Andrew's clouded past.  Unfortunately the reveal of what he has been hiding from himself comes as no surprise to the reader and it did kind of feel a bit Lifetime Movie for me.

A decent enough read but let down by overly clumsy set pieces.