All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-6

Part 1, Chapters 7-12

Part 2, Chapters 1-6

Part 2, Chapters 7-13

Part 3, Chapters 1-6

Part 3, Chapters 7-12

Part 4, Chapters 1-6

Part 4, Chapters 7-13

Part 5, Chapters 1-8

Part 5, Chapters 9-16

Part 5, Chapters 17-21

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Fear’s Stifling of Love

Content Warning: This section references physical and emotional abuse and drug use, and it centers on a sexualized relationship between an adult and a minor.

Fear neutralizes love. Love must come freely, and fear inhibits. Throughout All the Ugly and Wonderful Things, characters struggle with fear. A cloud of constant threat hangs over Parts 1 through 3. Wavy attempts to order her life by following a series of rules gleaned from her mother’s rants. Never knowing which version of her mother will appear from day to day, Wavy must prepare for the worst and be hypervigilant. Her father, while rarely around, presents a physical threat, almost never encountering Wavy without hitting her. This abuse shapes the way Wavy relates to those around her. She fears her mother will hurt her brother, so she protects him, hindering her ability to love him unconditionally. She knows they both have to avoid Val’s wrath.

Wavy’s love for Kellen remains questionable as long as she offers it from this destabilized place. Of course, Wavy loves Kellen; Kellen offers her respect, protection, and a certain measure of stability. An eight-year-old child depends on these factors to develop into a healthy adult, and Wavy can find them nowhere else. When all choices are bad choices, a bad choice becomes inevitable. Wavy has to find her security within herself, and then she can choose Kellen because she loves him, not because he represents a safety she can locate no other way.

After prison, Kellen fears his choices have made him a person he did not intend to be. That fear interrupts his ability to love Wavy. He associates her with danger, disaster, and loss, returning in his mind to the accident he had when he first met her. He feels he has run onto “loose gravel” (294); he is destabilized and incapable of giving his whole heart to her. Only when Wavy proves to Kellen he is worthy of her love—through invoking the system and standing by him—can Kellen give freely again.

Wavy’s aunt Brenda represents a very different kind of fear: one that comes from a place of privilege rather than one of powerlessness. More specifically, Brenda embodies the middle-class fear of poverty and the tenuous life that comes with it. Faced with taking care of Wavy and Donal after their parents’ murder, her husband views the children as a liability: He believes that because he pays taxes, his life should not be derailed by impoverished relatives. The system protects people like the Newlings. They call the police before attempting to talk and defuse a situation. They expect protection and the preservation of normalcy. In this state of fear, they are incapable of extending themselves in any true gesture of community or any authentic expression of love.

Overcoming the Dehumanization of Abuse

Abuse and neglect annihilate identity. Wavy builds herself from less than nothing, first by forging a questionable relationship. Without Kellen to register her for school and see that she ate, she would not have survived to find pleasure in the stars, in writing, or in making things. No one extends those opportunities to Wavy when she refuses to talk or eat, locking her in a downward spiral; the more others treat her as invisible, the more she erases herself with her own actions (or inactions). This is why Wavy fears losing Kellen’s attention more than (for example) his touch. As a child, Wavy needs Kellen to see her to prove to herself that she exists.

Kellen’s incarceration forces Wavy to depend on herself for this proof. Standing in the Newlings’ driveway, Wavy makes her first independent statement of identity, shouting “Mine!” and stopping Brenda from selling Kellen’s motorcycle. She wills herself into existence and causes something she wants to happen; what’s more, she does so in a way that both recalls and rejects her childhood sense that “nothing” of her existence belongs to her. She works a job while in high school so she can pay for the bike’s upkeep. In high school, she also knits, takes woodworking, and makes decorations for dances. These hands-on, productive activities are assertions of selfhood and agency—all the more so because she comments on suburban complacency by secretly making the dance decorations lewd.

After a mostly silent childhood, Wavy finds her voice writing letters to everyone she knows, including Donal and Kellen, knowing those letters will not be received or read. She learns to take pleasure in the world and her interaction with it, independent of how (or whether) others see her. She even works through the very institutions that have ignored her—e.g., the courts—to piece her family together, recovering Donal and reuniting with Kellen by forcing people like Judge Maber to recognize her. Once she can view herself as fully real, the abused, erased girl can heal.

Families of Blood Versus Families of Loyalty

At the end of the novel, Amy feels sorry for Wavy because the Newlings are Wavy’s only family, and Brenda has betrayed Wavy in a terrible way. Wavy identifies her family as Kellen and Donal when she tells the judge that her family is as real as anyone’s. From Wavy’s parents to her tenuous relationship with her aunt, the book challenges assumptions about family and loyalty.

Wavy learns from a young age that her ostensible family—her blood relations—are unreliable at best. Val tells Wavy she cannot trust Liam, her father. Wavy knows her mother manifests mood swings and a host of paranoid delusions, so she cannot be trusted either. Wavy overhears her aunt and uncle fighting about having to take care of her, discussing where she and Donal could be sent instead. The only family who tries to be responsible for Wavy is Grandma, but she dies too soon to be of much help to Wavy. Her memory serves as a guide, though, as Wavy holds on to the stars Grandma showed her as a kind of spell against chaos.

The next person after Grandma to bring any care or stability to Wavy is Kellen. Lacking any models other than Val and Liam’s girlfriends at the ranch, Wavy attempts to secure a romantic relationship with Kellen rather than a parent-like or sibling-like attachment. Family members cannot be trusted, so Wavy tries to create something else. Wavy also devotes herself to protecting Donal, until once again family proves unstable, and Sean turns out to be Donal’s biological father. Sean separates Wavy from Donal, isolating Wavy completely. In that isolation, Wavy finds the true source of her power. When as an adult she next asserts that Donal and Kellen are her family, she is not making a claim about biology or name but rather articulating that they have been loyal to one another through all kinds of adversity and pressure.

The novel closes with a mature Wavy, secure enough to come to her aunt’s home at Christmas to reunite the rescued Donal with their cousins. She offers forgiveness to the aunt who could not even respect or recognize her identity.