All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (Greenwood)

All the Ugly and Wonderful Things 
Bryn Greenwood, 2016
St. Martin's Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250074133


Summary
A beautiful and provocative love story between two unlikely people and the hard-won 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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1970-71
• Where—Hugoton, Kansas, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., Kansas State University
• Currently—lives in Lawrence, Kansas


Bryn Greenwood is an American writer of essays, short stories, and novels. The latter includes, Last Will (2012), Lie Lay Lain (2014), and All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (2016).

Like her heroine Wavy in her 2016 novel, Greenwood grew up in Kansas. One of seven sisters (the result of a blended family), her mother was a teetotaler, and her father a meth dealer, who ran one of the largest meth production and distribution businesses in the Midwest. Had meth been legal, she told KCUR Radio in Kansas City, he would haven been a billionaire. In another interview, she recalled...

He had a private plane and pilot, and there was always money except when there wasn’t. The money is like a faucet that’s turned on full blast for 10 minutes and then it’s turned off. And you wait for the next time the faucet is turned on.

When you have that kind of business, you have just hordes of hangers-on, an endless rotation of people going through your existence because they want to use you or they want to benefit from you or they’re just there for the drugs. So yeah, [my father's] life was a little crazy. (Kansas City Star).

Her parents divorced when Bryn was two; she lived mostly with her mother and with her fraternal grandparents. In the summers she spent time with her father—but that ended when she was 14, and he was sent to jail.

Also, like her heroine Wavy, Greenwood had a much older boyfriend: she was 13 and he 28. Because the novel's depiction of Wavy and Kellen's romance, Greenwood has received a fair amount of criticism from readers—even those who haven't read her book. When comparisons are made to Lolita, she noted that while Nabokov's book was written to make readers uncomfortable, that was not her purpose:

I didn’t intend at all for my book to shock or titillate. I’m more of the mind that: There are people who’ve lived this life, I have lived portions of this life, and they don’t see it in fiction (KCUR radio).

Greenwood discovered books early on and knew she wanted to write. Her first story came when she was four: she had to dictate it to one of her sisters. Years later, Greenwood went on to college and, eventually, to grad school where she earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from Kansas State University. She taught English in Japan for a while, returned to the U.S., and finally landed in Lawrence, Kansas, where she is now a college teacher and administrator.

She married, got divorced, bought a house (a work in progress), and lives with her hairless cats and adopted dogs. (Author bio by LitLovers.)

Book Reviews
Captivating and smartly written from the first page, Greenwood's work is instantly absorbing. Pithy characters saunter, charge or stumble into each scene via raw, gripping narrative. Greenwood slow-drips descriptions, never giving away everything at once. Rather, she tells her story as if lifting a cloth thread by thread, revealing heartbreaking landscapes and riveting dialogue in perfect timing. This book won't pull at heartstrings but instead yank out the entire organ and shake it about before lodging it back in an unfamiliar position.
Christina Ledbetter - Associated Press


Greenwood's haunting novel...is a story that will stay with readers long after the book is finished.
Lisa McLendon - Wichita Eagle


Bryn Greenwood has handed readers a strange—but strangely grabbing—tale.
Harry Levins - St. Louis Post-Dispatch


[A] strong debut...about a young girl’s triumph over the sordid life she might have led as the daughter of drug addicts, one of whom is a meth dealer.... This is a memorable coming-of-age tale about loyalty, defiance, and the power of love under the most improbable circumstances.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) [P]owerful, provocative debut chronicles a desolate childhood and a discomfiting love affair.... [T]he novel closes on a note of hard-won serenity, with people who deserve a second chance gathered together. Intelligent, honest, and unsentimental.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. From the first moment we meet Wavy, her life is filled with rules. Most are her mother's rules, but some are hers. What rules are holding Wavy back and which ones does she use to construct a sense of safety? How do the rules change as she grows up?

2. Wavy's fears and her efforts to resist fear are major themes in the story. How does the refrain "nothing left to be afraid of" guide Wavy's life?

3. More than once, it's remarked that the kitchen door of the farmhouse is unlocked, and Wavy points out that there isn't even a key to that door. On a practical level, what does it say about Wavy and the people around her that this door is never locked? As a metaphor, what does it tell us?

4. Kellen is a murderer and Wavy knows this from an early point in her relationship with him. How is she able to know this while still considering him a good person? What things in her life have prepared her to accept two seemingly contradictory ideas? How do you feel about this paradox?a

5. The book provides multiple points of view of Wavy and Kellen, including their own. How are your impressions of them altered by a narrator's biases? Who seems like the most reliable narrator? Who seems the least reliable? How do you decide whose opinion to trust?

6. Aunt Brenda's perspective is the one that most clearly correlates to our current social attitudes toward relationships like Wavy and Kellen's, but is she the hero of this story? To what degree do you sympathize with her?

7. Compared to Wavy, her cousins and her college roommate are ostensibly the product of "normal" upbringings. In what ways are they more emotionally healthy than Wavy? In what ways do they have similar emotional issues?

8. Until 2006, the state of Kansas had no law requiring a minimum age for marriage, as long as the underage bride or groom had parental or judicial consent. On occasion this produced child brides far younger than Wavy would have been. The law now sets the minimum age at 15, a year younger than the age of consent. How does marriage change our views of what would otherwise be statutory rape? What if Kellen's wish had come true, and he and Wavy had married after her 14th birthday? How would we view that relationship once it was sealed by law?

9. When we talk about "consent" we have a bad habit of restricting it to the question of sex, but what other types of consent are at play in the story? Stress is placed on Wavy's capacity to consent to a sexual relationship with Kellen, but what about her capacity to consent or refuse consent to other things?

10. Of the female role models in Wavy's life, which has the greatest effect on her? How do these role models color her views about herself and her relationships?

11. As much as we may wish for Wavy and Kellen's relationship to remain platonic, what do you feel contributes to its steady shift toward becoming first romantic and then sexual? What might have happened if it had remained platonic?

12. Amy narrates a large portion of Wavy's life, while only revealing parts of her own. How does she choose what to reveal and what to hide? And why might she prefer to tell Wavy's story over her own?

13. What is the dynamic between Wavy and Kellen as husband and wife at the end? Who do you see as the decision maker? The moral compass? What other roles have they taken on, and how comfortable are they in those roles? Considering their backgrounds, how likely are they to succeed in creating a healthy relationship and a "normal" family?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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