all the ugly and wonderful things by bryn greenwood

It could be that Greenwood is showing us a pedophile in his first cycle of grooming and raping. Also of note: Kellen uses adult porn, he doesn’t hang around kids he shows none of the patterns standard to pedophilia except that he has no friends his age and that he was bullied as a child. However: love between a pedophile and victim? That is just not how pedophilia works.īy and large, a man - even a young man- whose sexual attraction to children drives him to rape looses interest in that victim as she grows up unless he also suffers from ephebophilia (sexual attraction to teens). Now, I’ve experienced enough healing around the long-term abuse in my childhood that - well, I wouldn’t invite a pedophile to dinner, and I’d happily throw an active one into jail nonetheless, I no longer always react out of my history. Still, I am flabbergasted that Greenwood would use Ugly/Wonderful to so much as hint at a notion, perhaps a wish, that is patently delusional: Wavy and Kellen’s is a true love. However, writers write about what they write about. Why a person needs this understanding is anybody’s guess. That said …įrom the vocies of Goodreads to professional reviews, Ugly/Wonderful readers are encouraged to understand that the point of Greenwood’s book is to portray a pedophile in such a way that we can see how he would make his ultimate choice. In the novel, All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, author Bryn Greenwood sets out to show us the development and ultimate connubial bliss of the (we’ll call it for now) relationship between a grade-school girl, Wavy, and Kellen, a drug-runner who is eighteen when he first meets her - all set on a meth-making compound in the rural Midwest.Īnd Greenwood’s writing can be lovely.

All the ugly and wonderful things by bryn greenwood