Looking at: All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood
February 26, 2018
Your family is real, but mine isn’t?… I’m real. I’m as real as you are. My family is real like your family. — Bryn Greenwood, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things calls into question everything you know, rather what you think you know about love.
This book is not the epic love story of our generation. It is, however, an enthralling read… and it will destroy you.
The daughter of a pair meth addicts and dealers, Wavy Quinn bears little resemblance to the cookie-cutter image of what an adorable, blonde eight-year-old ought to be. Wavy walks through her life with an undeniable maturity that far exceeds her age. Being essentially the sole caregiver to her younger brother, Wavy performs nearly all the household chores, including feeding her brother and strung-out mother. Sprinkle in a retinue of other issues plaguing Wavy, and you have the basis of the book. Wavy’s world winds down its lonely road without much difference until one night when mammoth motorcyclist crashes outside her house.
All of the Ugly and Wonderful Things is fraught with dismaying and often graphic content, but it also offers a sincere, realistic, and completely unsentimental voice that carries well through the dialogue. In addition to the overall voice of the novel, the plot is extremely compelling and never leaves the reader bored. Be it by undeniable interest or the anxiety that the story invokes, I promise this is a quick read.
Greenwood never tells you what or how to feel; she simply sheds a light on the dark parts of the world that people go to great lengths to keep quiet. Often, showing means more than telling.
Truthfully, I have hardly read something so ugly and wonderful in my life. There is something so beautiful and raw about this story, yet so much of it was just plain hard to stomach. Imagine everything you have ever been told about how love and life are supposed to work, then twist it up, crumple it, burn it, and try to reimagine what it said.
I refuse to sugarcoat this– this book made me absolutely and undeniably uncomfortable, morally frustrated, and just plain angry. This book really hit a nerve with me. Personally, I do not believe the line between love and abuse is unclear or fine, especially when it comes to children. Still, abuse is an umbrella term, and it’s relative to individual standards of human interaction. I cannot find it in myself to justify some of the material in this novel, but that does not mean it is not worth your time.
The novel’s protagonists have no predispositions to cruelty. The characters are motived by compassion, loneliness, and strife, not some twisted sexual scheme. They seem to exist beyond the bounds of age and gender and societal constraints. It’s disturbing and disconcerting. Greenwood has written these characters, not as a list of adjectives but as a collection of actions and struggles and personal instances of perseverance, and that is what makes the novel so compelling and perplexing.
Wavy leads a life so irregular and utterly awful that her ideas of love are dangerously awry. How do extreme circumstances skew our perceptions of what is acceptable? What are we are willing to accept and live with after we have been pushed so far? What are we willing to put up with for love? When do we stop calling a child a child? What is the soul of an action, the outcome of the intention?
In short, this novel forces you to ask hard questions and search for hard answers. Honestly, I still cannot get a grip on what I think of this book. It hurts. It plays with your heart, and the “resolution” though long-awaited never quite comes through.
The only thing I can say about this book with any shred of certainty is that you will feel things, strong unwavering and somehow conflicting things. It will be ugly and wonderful and so confusing that you might wish you had never picked up the godforsaken book, but I hope that you will.
Rating: 8/10
You can find this book at your local Barnes & Noble or at these links: