As a rule, I don’t typically shit on books. Most of the books I read are at least decent, so even if I don’t personally enjoy them, I can recognize why others might. I know some people enjoy reading bad books because they can fall into that “so bad it’s funny” category, or the “love to hate it” one, but there are too many good books to read for me to spend time on the bad ones. Because of this, there aren’t many reasons for me to outright say that I think a book is “bad”. Rather, I just explain why I didn’t personally like it, what I thought was done well, what I thought was done poorly, and so on.
HOWEVER.
I once made the mistake of reading a book that was very, very bad. It’s easily the worst book I’ve ever read, and today I’d like to shit on it.
A few years ago I read All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood, and my view of the literary world changed forever. Just kidding. I did gain a much more skeptical view of Goodreads, though. I ended up reading this book (with very little prior knowledge of the subject matter) because it has a 4.02/5 on Goodreads. While some of the more popular reviews of the book are negative, I am absolutely bemused by how this book has such a high average score. It is utter tripe.
To give a brief overview of the plot, an abused girl befriends an ugly biker and they fall in love. That doesn’t sound like the absolute worst, I guess. Except, the characters have an age difference of 13 years and meet when the main character, Wavy, is eight. Their first sexual encounter occurs when she is 13 and the ugly biker, Kellen, is 25/26. Get the fuck out.
Anything that could possibly be good about this book is overshadowed by the constant and intense justification of their relationship.
I think the most insidious aspect of the novel is that Greenwood is clearly aiming to have readers sympathize with the characters and support their relationship. Wavy is an abused, traumatized child who forms an unhealthy attachment to an older man, and Greenwood frames this as romantic. Kellen is Wavy’s protector. He would never hurt her. By all other accounts, he’s really not a bad guy; just a pedophile.
There’s a very clear idea throughout the novel that Wavy is old for her age. I suppose Greenwood must not know this, but “being old for your years” doesn’t actually make you any older physically. Even if Wavy acts like an adult, she’s still eight years old when she meets Kellen. She’s still 13 when they first engage in sexual acts. There’s no justification for writing a story where these events are condoned. There’s a vast difference between writing a story like this to show how these relationships can occur and how to heal from them, and writing a story where these events occur and are eventually accepted as normal. Real women who suffer abuse do struggle with entering these types of relationships. It’s fucking sad, not romantic.
One of the common methods of defending this book has been to compare it to other books that have a similar storyline or situation. However, these defenses are not the airtight arguments people seem to think they are. They’re swiss cheese. Here are the two main arguments I’ve seen thus far:
1. Lolita portrays a relationship between a grown (old) man and a 12-year-old girl, and that book gets praised. Why is this novel condemned when the relationship isn’t nearly as predatory?
2. Historical novels portray young, teenage women marrying old men all the time. Why is no one up in arms about the romantic view of these relationships?
If you have any kind of common sense, you can see why these defenses are worthless. Apparently not everyone has common sense, though, because people are still treating these as legitimate arguments. Read on to see why they’re fucking not.
First and foremost, Lolita is written as a condemnation of these types of relationships. Whatever your views are on the book itself, it is very clear within the story that what Humber Humber is doing to Dolores is Bad. At the end of the novel, Dolores leaves Humbert Humbert for a more age-appropriate man and tells Humber how detrimental his interference in her life was. Humbert, acting as the narrator, also writes about Dolores in a very salacious manner. The reader can see that Humbert is a terrible person from the start, and there’s nothing romantic in the way he discusses his idealization of young Dolores.
As to the second point, it was normal in the past for older men to marry too-young women. That is a fact of history. The books written during those time periods reflected the events of the time. There are also a lot of books from this time where people marry their cousins. It was the way of things back then, and those things are not (often) practiced anymore. When people talk about period novels, they’re not praising them for the portrayal of young women marrying old men, or of cousins marrying. They’re overlooking this aspect in favor of the romantic story itself because we know “that’s just how it was back then”. Times have changed, and so have the books we write.
All the Ugly and Wonderful Things is specifically written to romanticize this relationship. We can see Wavy falling for Kellen throughout the story, and we can also see Kellen grappling with his feelings for her. Kellen is presented as an ultimately good person, which is the exact opposite of Humbert Humbert in Lolita. It is also set in the present day where having a relationship with an underage girl is very clearly illegal. Comparing this book to a historical novel where people really did get married so young makes very little sense.
The biggest issue isn’t with the relationship in itself, but in the way it’s condoned and supported by the author herself as well as characters in the book.
Wavy and Kellen do end up together at the end of the story, and it’s not a tragic ending either. They’re very happy together and neither sees anything wrong with their relationship at this point.
Kellen does receive condemnation for his actions at an earlier point in the story when he is sentenced to prison for his relationship with Wavy, but events later in the story contradict the idea that what he did was bad in any shape or form. I actually thought that his arrest was going to be a turning point where Wavy realizes that their relationship was wrong and predatory. I was incorrect.
When Kellen is released, he has a restraining order that tells him to stay away from Wavy. Wavy is the one who pursues him and, what do you know, they finally have full-on sex. She’s 18 at this point, and he’s over 30. Wavy visits the judge who enacted the restraining order on her behalf and requests that the order be lifted. The judge, in a very competent manner, explains that the restraining order is for Wavy’s own good, and that she will not lift the order.
This is the second time that I thought, “Okay, maybe NOW Wavy realizes that their relationship is terrible.” Yet again, I was incorrect.
The judge ends up writing a letter to Wavy saying she lifted the restraining order because, get this, it’s not her place to judge what types of relationships make people happy. She’s a judge. It quite literally is her job to judge things like this.
This ending makes the author’s intent very clear, I think. She wanted to write a book where a predatory relationship ends up being normalized and excepted because “love is love no matter what”. Except, it’s not. Predatory love isn’t real love. Taking advantage of a young girl who doesn’t know better isn’t real love. Taking advantage of victims of abuse isn’t real love.
Young, impressionable girls read these books and ascertain a warped view on what healthy relationships look like. It is so unbelievably irresponsible to write a book that condones such an awful example of an acceptable relationship. It’s absolutely shameful.
I will add a disclaimer here that I don’t know anything about Bryn Greenwood herself. I know that Colleen Hoover has books that often romanticize abuse, and it later turned out that she herself was in an abusive relationship. That doesn’t mean it’s okay to write books that romanticize abusers, but it’s a lot more understandable why she would write that type of book. Unfortunately, when the message is that this sort of predatory relationship or abuse is acceptable, it only helps to perpetuate the cycle of abuse. Showing what abuse looks like is only helpful if the message is, “This is what you should avoid”, not “This is okay because they’re in love.”
This is easily the worst book I’ve ever read, and if you choose to read it to see what it’s about, I highly encourage you to download a pdf file off the web to avoid giving any money to the author.
The Lit Wiz