By: Bryn Greenwood BUY BOOK HERE
All The Ugly and Wonderful Things is full of ugly and wonderful. I forget how lucky of a life I live. Actually, I don't forget, I know to be extremely grateful, but I sometimes don't realize how extremely awful some children, like Wavy, have it. I didn't even know it was something to worry about. I kept hoping someone in Wavy's life would step up--I was so disappointed by her teachers! Her parents are druggies and dealers. She is caring for her little brother and then tragedy strikes. May we all be a little more patient and kind to the "weird" ones. There is more suffering than meets the eye. Who are we to determine what love is for people who have suffered so much? Wavy finds wonderful in an ugly life.
“I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.”
Synopsis
A beautiful and provocative love story between two unlikely people and the relationship that elevates them above the Midwestern meth lab backdrop of their lives.
As the daughter of a drug dealer, Wavy knows not to trust people, not even her own parents. It's safer to keep her mouth shut and stay out of sight.
Struggling to raise her little brother, Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold.
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.
“Feeling dead was better than when my heart hurt. Sometimes I thought it might burn through my ribs while I was asleep, and smolder in the sheets until the whole house caught fire.”
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