All the Ugly and Wonderful Things
Author: Bryn Greenwood
New York Times Bestseller, 2016 Book of the Month “Lolly Award”, 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards (fiction)
Original Publication: 2016
Genre: Fiction
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things is a challenging read. There is no getting around that. This is a book about child abuse, drug abuse, violence, neglect, and a relationship that walks a very fine line between love and something deeply troubling. It is the kind of book where I found myself uncomfortable, conflicted, and thinking about it long after I finished.
But difficult does not mean unsuccessful.
Bryn Greenwood has written a story about profoundly damaged people trying to find something they desperately need: safety, connection, and the feeling of being seen. That does not make all of their choices acceptable. It does, however, make them painfully human.
Wovonna “Wavy” Quinn’s attachment to Kellen was, given everything she had experienced, completely unsurprising. Wavy is the daughter of a meth-dealing, drug-using, violent father and a mother who is so consumed by her own issues that she can barely care for herself, much less her children. Wavy is neglected, isolated, and taught from an early age that the world is not a safe place. She has been given almost no examples of healthy love.
I was lying on the tracks under a train I was in love with.
So when she finds the one adult who makes her feel protected and valued, it is not difficult to understand why she clings to him.
Understanding it, however, is not the same as excusing it.
That distinction is where this book lives.
Kellen is not an uncomplicated villain. He is also a damaged person, a child of alcoholics who suffered abuse and grew up believing he was worthless and stupid. In many ways, he is still a wounded little boy inside a man’s body. Wavy sees him in a way that few people ever have, and that matters to him. She treats him like a person, not a thing.
But? He is also the adult, and adults have responsibilities that children do not. Kellen struggles with this throughout the book. He knows something is wrong. He wrestles with whether he is sick, whether this situation is somehow different, whether there could possibly be exceptions.
The answer, at least for me, is no. There are not exceptions. His damage may explain why he makes the choices he does, but it does not make those choices acceptable.
And I think that is exactly why this book is so difficult to dismiss.
Greenwood’s writing is excellent. She does not shy away from harsh words because she is writing about harsh circumstances. The language is sometimes shocking, but it feels purposeful. Wavy’s understanding of relationships and sexuality has been shaped by what she has been exposed to, and Greenwood does not pretend that a child raised in those circumstances would have the same perspective as someone who grew up in a healthy environment.
You can look up keening in the dictionary, but you don’t know what it means until you hear somebody having their heart ripped out.
The story is told from the perspective of multiple/alternating narrators, and I enjoyed that in this case. Seeing Wavy and Kellen only through one another’s eyes might have pushed this over the line of justifying an “unconventional” romance. Instead, we see them through the perspectives of family members, friends, neighbors, and even people who barely know them, and that matters because we’re getting the whole picture of what’s happening.
Wavy’s aunt is horrified. Others struggle with what they are seeing. Some people understand pieces of it because of their own experiences. Kellen himself is constantly caught between knowing what is appropriate and what he feels. Even Wavy’s college roommate views the relationship through a completely different lens because she encounters it after the fact, as an adult relationship, rather than knowing how it began.
Greenwood gives the reader all of those perspectives and lets us sit with the discomfort.
One question I kept considering was whether an unhealthy relationship is better than no relationship at all.
Under normal circumstances, I would say no. Go to therapy; heal thyself before getting involved with someone else. But these are not normal circumstances. These are two profoundly damaged people who find comfort in one another when neither of them has had any experience with healthy love. It is incredibly human to crave love and human connection, regardless of whether you have any sort of normal perspective on what that should look like.
That does not make it right.
But it does make it understandable.
And perhaps that is the part of the book that resonated with me the most. Wavy sees Kellen when others have dismissed him as broken or stupid. Kellen sees Wavy when the other adults around her have failed her miserably. They find something in one other that each of them desperately needs.
The tragedy is that sometimes the people who save us are not the people who are capable of healing us.
I would not say this book gave me hope for humanity in the way some unforgettable books do. It did not leave me believing that people are always good or that love conquers all. Instead, it left me thinking about survival, trauma, and the complicated ways people cope when they have never been exposed to healthy relationships with others.
Wavy survives her circumstances, although whether she becomes a functional adult is another question. Without Kellen, she may not have survived childhood at all. That does not erase what happens, but it does complicate the story in a way that is hard to ignore.
Fun Fact: All the Ugly and Wonderful Things was turned down a whopping 122 times by literary agents, before being picked up by St. Martin’s press. Executive Editor Laurie Chittenden said, “We’re willing to take risks at St. Martin’s. A book doesn’t have to fit within a box for us. I knew we had something special when people from across the house I’d sent the manuscript starting emailing saying they had fallen in love with it.”
Bother if: You appreciate literary fiction that explores morally complicated situations, damaged characters, trauma, and the uncomfortable gray areas of human behavior. You won’t walk away hating Kellen, and you’ll feel like you probably should. If you enjoy books that make you think long after you finish reading, this one will likely stay with you.
Don’t bother if: You struggle with stories involving child abuse, neglect, grooming behaviors, violence, or relationships with significant power imbalances. The subject matter is not a minor element of the story; it is the foundation of the entire reading experience. I thought this was worth reading, but it does ask a lot of the reader. If you think your “ick” factor would be too strong, I can see giving this one a miss.
