All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel

Let get a few things corrected before we start. Pedophile: A person who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children. That means that this book is not about pedophilia. Sorry, that's simply the fact. A word means something, it doesn't mean just what you want it to. Now that we got that out of the way, lets actually talk about the book and not the hot button words people like to throw around to get attention. This book does detail with a relationship between an adult and what is by popular definition a child. I used those words carefully as the girl child is between the ages of 10 to 14 during most of the book. There is sexual conduct between the characters, masturbating each other is about as far as we are getting here however. I'm not going to go into the good or bad of the relationship, mostly because historically as soon as a woman menstruated she was considered sexually adult and I have personal experience of being taken advantage of as a child. In the end you either are okay with the material or find it offensive, no arguments I make for or against are going to change that. Good 1: Beautiful romance, I loved Wavy and Kellen and thought the moments together were touched with real love. I never felt he was manipulating her, in fact many times I felt she had the upper hand. This book is clearly one where the female is the driver in the relationship. Everything they do together is instigated by her despite his objections. She is simply the only person he loves and the only thing that gets him up in the morning. 2: The characterizations were well done. I was able to get into the heads of the two with Wavy being the more fleshed out model while Kellen felt a little cliché to me. She was the stronger person, if there was no Kellen then Wavy still would of been okay but if Wavy wasn't around Kellen would of eaten a bullet. Kellen to me is a much more tragic figure than Wavy, when he was growing up he didn't have anyone to love him. There were no hero's in Kellen's life, no one to stop the abuse, no one to run too, no one that cared that he went to school. All he had was broken dreams and a battered heart. 3: The overall arc was well done. There were some choices I didn't like but I'll get into those later. The beginning relationship was done fantastic and makes up the most riveting part of the book. You get to see the simple magnificent dysfunction of a family. None of us live in the movies, instead out lives are created out of the dreams we want and the horrors we are put through. I found the family life of the Aunt to be both realistic and sorrowful in its own right. Bad 1: Too many POV's. Sorry but I like my books to be tightly focused on my main characters and while all the POV's revolved around them, while it was illuminating to see them from other angles, I felt that it distracted from the overall book. Some were essential but others felt like filler. This is purely a stylistic thing and should in no way indicate I thought it was bad writing. 2: The ending with the Aunt lacked any kind of punch. There wasn't enough to redeem the character in my book so that meant I felt cheated when it fizzled out. No realizations, no payback, just nothing. 3: The brother was a kind of throw away. I would of liked to have more of how they found him and what he'd gone through. A few chapters of happily every after instead of a brief epilogue of the highlights. We went through hell to see them together, the least we could do was actually get to enjoy it before the book ended. Overall A wonderful book that shows serious guts to tackle such a taboo subject with both understanding and caring. It had to be hell to write this book and wonder just how it would do when it was so out there as far as subject matter. The author stuck to her guns and wrote a book that I think will become one of my favorite in this genre. Few artists have the kind of mettle to create art that they know others will attack. To see those attacks you only have to look at the other reviews. This book isn't about sex with minors, or if you think love will triumph over anything and it sure isn't about pedophilia. Its simple about Wavy and Kellen and their love. Ugly, grotesque, strange and fey, it isn't my kind of love but then no one is asking me to love like them.

I don't know where to begin. The writing in this book is so beautiful. I felt like I was cocooned in a safety blanket in the early first half of the book. Whenever Kellen and Wavy were out in the meadow, I felt that summer heat or the autumn breeze, and if I just closed my eyes I'd be able to see the stars along side them. For a book to give me that much feeling is something magical. Let me live in it forever. Which, the book pretty much lets me do. For it's not just some "hey look at the pretty stars" thing. Nope. It's naming and mapping and it's brought up countless times throughout the book. The stars are as much a part of them (Kellen and Wavy) as their love is. Hearing it repeated while going through all the ups and downs of their life makes it a constant comfort. Wavy even studies to be an astrophysicist. Like come on. If that doesn't get you going than maybe it'll be the characters. They're all a bit quirky and hold interest. It feels like if you just peek through the blinds long enough you'd learn everything there is to know about them. The info and details come in snippets and you're collecting as you go. Wavy, however, is by far the strangest. Which is why I love her. She has quirks and issues and bows to no one. Then Kellen comes and just seeing her grow emotionally and mentally is the best thing. A+ development. Which brings me to the romance of this book. There's a lot of talk of normalizing age gap relationships and I'm not going to sit here and argue for what is right or wrong. This is a story and in this story, for these two people, this relationship works. Are they an exception? You bet. But I know older married brilliant couples who have similar age gaps and I'm not looking down my nose at them. In this case, it's worth asking the question, "what would happen if this couple met when they were younger?" and well tada. Their love starts super innocent. It builds from trust and understanding. Grows more beautiful and don't for a second think Kellen doesn't know he shouldn't do this. He goes through so much sht for Wavy and Wavy fights for him like I've never seen her fight for anything else. It's special and it hurts to see them have to fight for it. The only thing keeping this book from a glowing five stars (I was really close to giving it five stars too) is mainly for the end chapters. The ending is fine! It was just how we got there that felt a bit rushed? Anticlimactic? It was kinda just given to us instead of feeling really deserved. Not saying there was no hard work given. Maybe it was because I really wanted to have someone slap Brenda with her ignorance. So kudos to Wavy being more mature than me i guess, haha. Still, it could have had some more tension. Also, there's some pretty odd jump cuts in the writing. For instance Wavy was at the hospital, and I kid you not, within a sentence runs out of the room, mentions a carnival that was down the street and now suddenly we're there. However, there weren't enough to distract me and I know it was more to cut out unneeded details. Still a little odd though. That and all the different people who narrate the chapters. I don't know if I needed all these outside voices...though it can be refreshing at times. Amy's voice was my favorite. All in all this book is worth the read and the praise. Seriously give it a chance.

Die Geschichte von Wavy und Kellen ist wirklich einzigartig, herzergreifend, überraschend, schockierend und fesselnd bis zur letzten Seite. Ich habe tatsächlich noch nichts Vergleichbares gelesen und lange nicht mehr so sehr bei einem Roman mitgefiebert. Immer wieder denkt man "Nein, bitte bitte lass das jetzt nicht passieren" und dann passiert es doch. Man muss echt auf alles gefasst sein und damit meine ich ein paar wirklich hässliche Dinge, für die die Beschreibung Drama eigentlich gar nicht ausreicht. Man wird bis in die Grundfesten erschüttert. In diesem Buch steckt so viel Schmerz und gleichzeitig Liebe, so viel Gefühl und Glück, dass man trotz kontroverser Themen Sympathie für die ausgefallenen und echt speziellen, doch dadurch gerade wahnsinnig realistischen Charaktere entwickeln muss. Gleichzeitig werden die eigenen Wertvorstellungen in Frage gestellt und man wird zum Nachdenken angeregt. Noch lange nachdem ich das Buch zu Ende gelesen hatte, ging mir die Geschichte nicht mehr aus dem Kopf. Fazit: Absolut lesenswert, ein Must-Read!

O livro tem uma narrativa interessante pela perspectiva de vários personagens. Mas o enredo se torna quase um livro de romance barato, qdo entra em detalhes sexuais do relacionamento dos personagens. E, o tema relacionado à pedofilia pode não agradar alguns leitores, pois a autora tenta justificar os atos de um adulto em relação à uma menina de 14 anos por causa de amor.

My first thoughts before opening this book was hmmn not sure this will be for me, then I started to understand and accept how this situation could come about in the way it did, does this make me weird or a freak... probably and I'm so not sorry, love love love this story! The writing is incredible, the emotions it stirs wow what a roller coaster.

I'm not sure if I have ever felt so many different emotions, so powerfully, when reading a book. Anger. Hatred. Overwhelming sadness. Indecision. I'm still not sure how I feel about this book and some of the things that happened. I just know that I have to get my thoughts out by writing this review. That rarely happens immediately after I finish a book. Sorry this review is long, I have a lot to say. I don't even know what to classify this book as. I can't say it's a beautiful love story. I can't, and I won't. It's raw. It's gritty. It's actually quite disturbing at times. And it's fascinating. It's fascinating because it will push the boundaries of everything you believe about love. About right and wrong. I'm just going to put this out there in case you didn't catch on from the blurb. This is a story of an abused, young girl, Wavy. She begins what is a very important friendship with an equally damaged and lonely, adult man, Kellen. Wavy is damaged from the abuse she has suffered, in so many ways. It's infuriating and heartbreaking to watch what she goes through. Kellen comes along and protects her. He takes care of her in all the ways her parents don't. Ultimately, that friendship turns to love. When she's still very underage. I'll just leave it at that. All I will say is that this story does span many years. By the time it's all said and done, Wavy is an adult. BRAVE. Wow. This book was brave. After finishing, I have so much to say but that word keeps coming back to me. To write a detailed story like this, with the abuse Wavy suffers, the life she's forced to live as a child is hard enough. But my god, to add that kind of “love story.” So BRAVE. I need to be clear, I don't think it's brave because readers will have some big epiphany that what happened should EVER be tolerated in our society. And I can't say this was a story that needed to be told to open the readers eyes, or to make them learn some important lesson. It's brave because it IS wrong. As humans, we know this is wrong. But the author made me believe that no matter how wrong, these two saved each other from a fate MUCH WORSE than what would have become of them had they not had each other. She made me ask questions I never thought I would ask myself. She made me answer those questions in a way that I never thought I could. Ever. And probably never will again. SMART. So smartly written. This is what made this story. The lack of cheap plot tricks to make the reader fall for Kellen was so brilliant. She never tried to make you fall in love with him or to find the “forbidden” angle sexy. It was never meant to be romantic or sexy. This book is told in multiple POV's from many different characters. From Wavy, Kellen, family, and friends. Those multiple POV's allowed the reader to feel angry. To feel heartbroken. To decide for yourself whether their relationship was right or wrong. The author never forced what she wanted you to feel down your throat. Crazy as it may seem, in the end, I felt okay with where these two ended up. A product of everything HORRIBLE they had ever been through, especially Wavy, they were able to give each other something that no one else could've ever given them. No one. And she made me believe that they both deserved to have that. How the author made me believe that, I have no idea. As a mother of a nine year old girl, I'm still baffled that she was able to do that. REAL. Despite all the madness, these characters felt very real to me. If you can make it far enough in the book, you will root for these characters to triumph over everything. It's just a matter of if you will root for them to do so together. Either way, I have no doubt that readers will feel very strongly, one way or another, about this book. Here's the thing, I can't say I loved how this book made me feel. What I can say is that is was brilliantly written. It made me feel so much. It made me ask so many questions. It is a book that I will continue to think about for a very long time. It deserves no less than five stars for that. It is NOT for everybody. I don't think everyone will be able to read this one. But, if you ever want to push yourself outside of your comfort zone, this is the book to do that with.

Excelente libro. Una historia que te envuelve, te hace pedazos el corazón y te lo vuelve a pegar.... una y otra vez.