A review by shelfimprovement
The Beginners by Rebecca Wolff

1.0

Ugh, I gave this one up about a hundred pages in. I read some good things about this book, about a young woman uncovering secrets about the new neighbors in her small New England town, but man it just did not deliver. I hated the main character, Ginger. I thought that she took things way, way too seriously for a fifteen year old. I get that she was supposed to be bookish, socially awkward, an outside, but man - she reminded me of a character from my own life that a friend and I used to snarkily refer to as "The Angstrom." Her biggest problem was that she wouldn't get out of her own head long enough to actually look at the world. It made it very difficult to relate to Ginger. Wolff's narration was clumsy and I often found myself confused as to what was going on. Also - did anyone else notice that she'd occasional slip into a Yoda cadence - "Falling in love we were." Who the hell talks like that? It drove me nuts.