The Beginners - Rebecca Wolff

I normally love reading anything that involves the Salem Witch Trials. I just find the time period fascinating. This though? Just god awful. Seriously.

 

  • >The connection to the Salem Witch Trials is pretty paper thin. I felt duped reading this, there's so much skeevy sexual activity going on and nothing about the cover or the synopsis to hint at it being there.

 

> The writing style, to me, largely seemed to have a heavy, clunky rhythm. I seem to be unlucky in trying to find books that I like that are written by poet-turned-novelist authors. But when you think about it, it is like working with different mediums. Writing poetry has a completely different rhythm to writing fiction or nonfiction. Talent in one doesn't necessarily mean talent in the others. The writing style here -- I think it was the rhythm, mostly -- just didn't work for me. 

 

> I found the plot largely uninteresting, kept waiting for something big or intense to happen. What did happen just grossed me out. 

 

> I felt this book was unnecessarily raunchy. A 15 year old girl works for a guy who keeps a stack of porn magazines in the employee bathroom {WTF... who does that??!} so she seems to be constantly locking herself in the bathroom for personal happy times, let's say. So she's always looking at these mags, thinking about these mags, checking out her female friends... and I could have dealt with that much, I know it's a sexually curious age with all the hormones, I was there. The part that seriously skeeved me out is when the 20-something couple comes to town, and the guy starts blatantly flirting with this girl and her best friend, sometimes in front of his wife (who doesn't seem to mind all that much), sometimes when she's out of the room. When these attentions progress, does the girl say / think / have a moment's pause to note that this is wrong on all levels? Nah, not really. Instead she starts going into these descriptions of what she hopes the guy will do to her that instead of reflecting the voice of the average 15 year old, sounds like the author binge read Penthouse magazine for her inner monologue cues.  Blech! I was thinking that this was all entirely unneccessary to the plot, until I realized this was in fact, the majority of the plot. The Salem Witches tie is nearly non-existent and hardly mentioned except for a couple brief lines in passing... that's it, in the whole novel... almost as if it were only added in to lend a thread of legitimacy to what would otherwise be underage erotica. And what really annoyed me was the fact that there's no indication of any of this from reading the synopsis or from the cover art. You won't know until you've already purchased / borrowed the book and started reading... or you see a warning review such as this. 

 

 

  • This thing sounded like a YA 50 Shades. Blech. Cannot, will not recommend.

In regards to the title -- The Beginner is the name of one of the porn magazines the girl likes to read, featuring essays written by readers about their experiences with deflowering sexual partners. 

 

The Beginners (the title) is in reference to two of the girl and her best friend (one voluntarily, one not) losing their virginity.

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