Book Review: The Beginning of Everything by Robyn Schneider

The Beginning of Everything
Author: Robyn Schneider
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary Romance | Realistic Fiction
Released: July 29th 2014 (paperback edition)
Review Source: Purchased

Robyn Schneider's The Beginning of Everything is a witty and heart-wrenching teen novel that will appeal to fans of books by John Green and Ned Vizzini, novels such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and classics like The Great Gatsby and The Catcher in the Rye.

Varsity tennis captain, Ezra Faulkner, was supposed to be homecoming king, but that was before—before his girlfriend cheated on him, before a car accident shattered his leg, and before he fell in love with unpredictable new girl Cassidy Thorpe.

As Kirkus Reviews said in a starred review, "Schneider takes familiar stereotypes and infuses them with plenty of depth. Here are teens who could easily trade barbs and double entendres with the characters that fill John Green's novels."

Funny, smart, and including everything from flash mobs to blanket forts to a poodle who just might be the reincarnation of Jay Gatsby, The Beginning of Everything is a refreshing contemporary twist on the classic coming-of-age novel—a heart-wrenching story about how difficult it is to play the part that people expect, and how new beginnings can stem from abrupt and tragic endings.

Ezra Faulkner - golden boy whose gold quickly tarnished. See, Ezra believes everyone goes about their uneventful, seemingly meaningless life up until they come upon their personal tragedy. Something so terrible, that everything changes from that point on. Ezra got his tragedy a few days before his junior prom. An accident that caused his simple life plan of going onto college and get a free ride off of a tennis scholarship shattered within seconds. His friends turned out to not be there for him at all and he became a shell of the person he thought he was. Then Cassidy Thorpe comes along and he gets his best friend, Toby, back and he finds who he really is.

This book does do a great job at analyzing and breaking down high school. A place filled with friends who aren’t really friends and social boundaries that would seem ridiculous elsewhere, as stereotypical as it sounds. This is quite a simple story of someone who was living the life everyone else expected him to live up until he decided to find himself in the aftermath of his tragedy.

I liked this book, I really did. Ezra seems like a complex guy. Cassidy seems like an even more complex girl. There is a plot twist right at the end, that just didn’t do it for me.