Title: Ordinary Beauty Author: Laura Wiess
Published: June 14, 2011
Genre(s): Realistic/Contemporary
Page Count: 290
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Sayre Bellavia grew up knowing she was a mistake: unplanned and unwanted. At five months shy of eighteen, she’s become an expert in loneliness, heartache, and neglect. Her whole life she’s been cursed, used, and left behind. Swallowed a thousand tears and ignored a thousand deliberate cruelties. Sayre’s stuck by her mother through hell, tried to help her, be near her, be important to her even as her mother slipped away into a violent haze of addiction, destroying the only chance Sayre ever had for a real family.
Now her mother is lying in a hospital bed, near death, ravaged by her own destructive behavior. And as Sayre fights her way to her mother’s bedside, she is terrified but determined to get the answer to a question no one should ever have to ask: Did my mother ever really love me? And what will Sayre do if the answer is yes?
Some books hit you hard, impact you personally; others are just entertainment. Ordinary Beauty was a raw, personal experience for me. Laura Wiess has tapped into one disadvantaged teen’s life and laid it all bare with this book, and it hurts. I was anticipating good things with this book, but I’ve just been blown away.
From beginning to end, Ordinary Beauty was an intense series of emotional punches. Wiess takes the reader by hand and leads her through narrator Sayre’s life. One bad experience after another, heartbreak after heartbreak. Honestly, the kind of life Sayre lead seems almost implausible, but the realness of the emotion keeps things from becoming telenovela-esque.
Timeframe-wise, the book takes place over the course of a single night. Sayre’s mother is dying in the hospital, and we’re waiting for the eventual death. However, through flashbacks, Ordinary Beauty cover the entirety of Sayre’s life up until the hospital scene, and the starkness of those flashbacks are what give this story its compelling intensity.
Sayre, as a young woman, has obviously dealt with some tough situations, but she’s come out of it all and proved herself to be resilient and determined. She’s a very admirable young woman, and I loved how Wiess was able to portray her as a strong character, but also a character whose emotions were made acessible to the reader.
Weiss has not written a book for the faint of heart here. It’s number-one strength is in how it reaches out to its reader and grabs them, not by the brain, but by the gut. A lot of realistic fiction fails to create an emotional investment, but Ordinary Beauty has certainly done that here. This is a powerful, honest novel that really rocked me as a reader.
