All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

Product Information

Wavy’s life is messed up. Kellan is one of the only good things in the whole thing. I completely rooted for these two characters. Achingly raw and beautifully written, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things is both a hypnotic coming-of-age story and a heartbreaking tragedy. Greenwood’s emotional prose and her well-drawn characters immediately drew me in and kept me captivated. Leslie’s face fell when she saw our cousin, but I wasn’t disappointed. As soon as my mother opened the door, Wavy stepped in and surveyed her new home with a bottomless look I would grow to love, but that would eventually drive my mother to despair. Her eyes were dark, but not brown. Grey? Green? Blue? You couldn’t really tell. Just dark and full of a long view of the world. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were translucent, to match her hair. Silver-blond, it clung to her head and ran trails of water off her shoulders onto the entryway tile. My mother got out of the car and ran across the library parking lot. She looked so ferocious, loping toward me in her nightgown and coat, that I expected a blow. Punishment. Instead, she jerked me into her arms and pressed me to her chest. When tragedy rips Wavy's family apart, a well-meaning aunt steps in, and what is beautiful to Wavy looks ugly under the scrutiny of the outside world. Kellen may not be innocent, but he is the fixed point in Wavy and Donal's chaotic universe. Instead of playing it safe, Wavy has to learn to fight for Kellen, for her brother, and for herself.

You walk into her room and there she is, on a table, completely naked, legs spread wide, he is sitting there, shirt off, pants open, touching her. Yes, this book is beautifully written and utterly compelling. And I hate leaving books unfinished because I feel like I can't judge a book rightfully without reading the last word, which is why I didn't DNF it. But not the most amazing book in the world would set paedophilia right. Not one. So open your eyes. And call it what it is.Bryn Greenwood: Obviously, my agent and my editor at St. Martin’s Press were my strongest supporters for this book. My agent loved the story enough that she took it to auction. My editor loved it enough that she bought and published it. Neither of them ever suggested to me that I should change it. As for me, the riskier something is the more likely I am to try it. I wrote the book with my whole heart and it never occurred to me to be afraid to send it out into the world. I would rather write books that are problematic but passionate than something I feel lukewarm about.

The fact that Kellen was a father-figure, in many ways, to Wavy for so long made accepting their romantic relationship all that much harder for me. It just was unfathomable to me that Kellen would go there. Who does that? Wavy's parents are crazy. Her father Liam doesn't even live with them, he lives down the road with his drug stuff and women. Their mom is crazy train and you can't talk to her at all. I can't even begin to tell you how Wavy lives. How she eats. These are things you need to read for yourself. Wavy and I eavesdropped from the other side of the kitchen door. Her games all involved sneaking around and finding people’s secrets, like the cigarettes my father hid in a coffee can in the garage. Will there be any other books that will include the characters from All the Ugly and Wonderful Things?I was hoping their relationship would remain platonic until the threat of legal action ceased to be an issue. However, for Wavy, sex was a natural extension of male-female relationships. With the adults in her life, sex was always present, spoken ... - kdowney25 If we could give this more than five stars we most definitely would. But, since we can't this gets another five ***** sparkly stars from me! My sister, Brenda and I decided to do another sister read and this time around we chose ALL THE UGLY AND WONDERFUL THINGS by BRYN GREENWOOD. What an extremely good choice we made in reading this one together. This is by far the best book we have read in quite some time and we have read some pretty good books lately. Now there were a few things that we didn't totally agree with and found ourselves questioning while reading this one but the way that the author delivered this story was absolutely riveting and hard to put down.

Bryn Greenwood: I typically write while sitting on my couch with my dogs. It’s not my favorite place to write, but the dogs seem to like it. I will write almost anywhere, and in fact, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things was written while I was camped out in a friend’s spare bedroom. By the time Wavy is a teenager, her relationship with Kellen is the only tender thing in a brutal world of addicts and debauchery. When tragedy rips Wavy's family apart, a well-meaning aunt steps in, and what is beautiful to Wavy looks ugly under the scrutiny of the outside world. A powerful novel you won't soon forget, Bryn Greenwood's All the Ugly and Wonderful Things challenges all we know and believe about love. Why does there have to be something wrong with her?” Dad said. “Maybe she’s just weird. God knows your sister’s weird enough. I don’t have time for you to get hysterical over everything she does. We have to wrap up the books on the fiscal year-end.” it's official - coolest author-present ever!! thank you for this, and for writing this book, o bryn greenwood!! Seriously, that seems to be all the craze these days. Authors seem to think that saddling their characters with all of these heinously tragedy-filled pasts acts as automatic characterization.

Book Summary

And then the not-so-wonderful: the feelings grow sexual in nature. The problem is that one is a child who develops an unhealthy attachment to her caretaker, an adult man. Their relationship turns overtly sexual when she is 13. Unfortunately, the sex in this book is overly descriptive (what she witnesses and what she participates in), which to me just highlights the ugliness of it all. Such explicit details were unnecessary and gratuitous.

I came to the end of the novel with my mind reeling, my emotions scattered, and completely unsure exactly what I did feel about it... but one thing is certain: I felt. Oh hell, I felt. When she first brings Wavy home she realizes how very different her granddaughter is, but she accepts Wavy for who she is and they start to forge a tight bond. I LOVED her grandmother. Sadly, Wavy isn't with Grandma for very long.

Media Reviews

I am so in love with Wavy, Donal and Kellen. Yeah, there were some things that made me cringe with Kellen but it wasn't the way that it seemed. Living the kind of life Wavy and her brother Donal had to live, there is not anything normal and they only had one savior, Kellen. As she grows up Kellan stays by her side. He is the person she goes to when she can’t get registered for school because neither of her parents can get their act together to make sure she is going. He stands in when she needs someone. He is the one that protects her. There was only one thing that was sorta wonky for me in this book and honestly it’s not a biggie because I didn’t even notice until I was half-way though the book. The time period was the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. I don’t remember meth being the drug of choice during that time period. See the thing is…My dad was a drug dealer during that time period. I think this book got into my heart and head so much because some of my past was similar to Wavy’s. I remember being at school and the police officer’s bringing in some drug paraphernalia and it being some of my dad’s stuff. Raids and a fear of the police were nothing new at that house. (Relax-my dad served his time later and my family went even more nuts into religion-but that’s a whole nuther story) My family is a total Jerry Springer wet dream.