Book Review
Everything Beautiful - Simmone Howell
Review: Funny, charming and just a little bit tear-jerker-y, Simmone Howell’s Everything Beautiful is a wonderful coming-of-age story that takes everything you thought you knew about Young Adult literature and turns it on its head.
Riley Rose, the main character, is a larger than life tearaway who, after an incident involving vodka jellies and a swimming pool, is sent to Church Camp for a week. There, she befriends Dylan Luck, a teenage veteran of the Spirit Ranch Holiday Camp - a paraplegic who lost the use of his legs in, according to camp gossip, either a suicide attempt or a surfing accident. It’s a Young Adult novel, so of course, they get together - but it’s not a straightforward path. Escape missions, newly-formed friendships and camp-wide arguments feature highly in the novel, which is told through the hilariously melodramatic eyes of Riley. There’s sex, drugs and rock-and-roll; car-jacking, alcohol and foul language - not your typical church-camp activities! But Everything Beautiful is a tale of two broken teenagers as they discover that life can be worth living if you’ve got a little faith - and it ends, as Young Adult novels are wont to do, with characters falling in Like.
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