A review by paigelm
Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined by Danielle Younge-Ullman

4.0

I loved Ingrid. I thought she was funny and smart and thoughtful. The end was a huge plot twist that I am not sure was necessary. SPOILER--Throughout camp she is always claiming that nothing that tragic has happened to her to down play her reason for being there. We find out that her mom attempted suicide, but survived, and that is one of the reasons she had a mental breakdown and needed to go to this camp. However, maybe the real reason she is having a hard time (although I guarantee finding your mom almost dead in her bedroom would be plenty to make you feel just completely overwhelmed, terrified, sad, depressed, etc.), is that her mom was actually successful in killing herself. She doesn't tell anyone at camp the true story about her mom, which is the whole point of the camp so everybody's demons come out in the open and get processed in this place that is mind-bending and extreme, harsh and beautiful, but gets close telling one person about the garage she tore down with an ax, however it seems to me her over explaining of why she has no business being at this camp because nothing as tragic has happened to her is a huge red herring, just put in place so you as a reader think that nothing extreme happened so they can give the big reveal at the end bothered me, and seemed like to much of a construct to have the reveal in the plot instead of a true discussion of what you would feel like. That being said, I think that some of the emotions displayed in this book are true and raw, not neat and expected, which makes me like that this last plot twist happened even less, because it is not that the author couldn't express multiple different complex emotions for multiple different intense life scenarios, whether it is losing your family because they expel you for being gay, or losing your child to the foster care system, or being addicted to drugs and becoming a sex worker, but just wanted the big reveal at the end of the story more, kind of cutting her character development off at the knee point. Maybe I am making a mountain out of a mole hill.

Also, one other big beef is the cover. Who did that and did they even read the book? I understand the curtains are for the theater and the fire is for the wilderness camp, but they definitely didn't have chairs that you take to a concert in the park that they were carrying with them through their 21 hike and paddle through the wilderness. If Ingrid couldn't keep War and Peace, the campers in PEAK wilderness are not carrying around chairs with cup holders to sit in. So why are the people in the PEAK wilderness program on the front cover sitting in lawn chairs that my parents use. Also, with all the potential of beautiful scenes that could have been used it seems like a missed opportunity.