Beautiful

Children's Literature - Jennifer Lehmann

Beautiful is a devastating look at the downward spiral of an adolescent girl seeking acceptance. Cassie has just moved from Bainbridge Island to Seattle. No one at her new school knows her as the pudgy nobody her classmates in her small town ignored. Here, now, she is beautiful and determined to be noticed. Her decisions, while terrifying for the reader, are perfectly understandable. Her parents are loving, but more involved in their own unhappiness than in keeping a close watch on Cassie. Her new friend Alex is her ticket into the world of drugs, sex, and acceptance, but Alex's personal demons become clearer and more dangerous as their friendship deepens. The first-person, present-tense voice keeps the reader constantly absorbed in Cassie's life and never sure what the next moment may bring. Through Cassie's eyes, we see how easy it is to fall and how brutal the world can really be. Though fear never loses its grip on Cassie or on the reader's attention, persistent hope is what keeps the pages turning. For all its rawness, the story itself is beautiful and vital. Reviewer: Jennifer Lehmann

School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up—Thirteen-year-old Cassie has bloomed. Following her family's move from an island off the coast of Washington to a Seattle suburb, she has a new attractiveness that earns her the moniker "the beautiful seventh grader." Her good looks and willingness to conform are a passport to her school's powerful clique of druggies led by Alex, a frightening but charismatic fellow seventh grader who adopts Cassie as her best friend. Cassie's compliance with Alex's demands—to burn photographs of former friends, to take acid, to have sex—secures her a position as Alex's second in command but threatens her health and safety. When Alex's half sister Sarah moves in with Alex and her wasted mother, Cassie finds her allegiance shifting from her best friend to Sarah. Reed's first novel owes a tremendous debt to Catherine Hardwicke's 2002 film Thirteen; however, where the filmic treatment of its 13-year-old heroines' dangerous experimentation is complicated by the richness of their characters and their interactions with one another and the supporting cast, this novel is less complex and more sensational. It is difficult to discern motivation for many of the characters, whose actions—Alex's in particular—are explained in almost clichéd form, and the secondary characters are one-dimensional.—Amy S. Pattee, Simmons College, Boston

Kirkus Reviews

Thirteen-year-old Cassie makes a snap decision to reinvent her nerdy, unpopular self when she moves to a new school district in Seattle. When green-haired Alex invites-actually drags-her over to the table where the "dangerous" ninth-grade boys sit, she goes along. And from there she goes along, unresisting, with everything else: heavy drinking, constant use of myriad drugs, sexual encounters that she dislikes and theft. Her dysfunctional, self-absorbed parents are numb to her growing despair, which results from her out-of-control behavior. Cassie shows remarkable insight in her first-person narration, even through her drug-induced fog. When another teen, sexually abused by her father, falls under Alex's thrall and reaches out to Cassie for help, the seventh grader hits rock bottom. Rather than acting as a cautionary tale, this novel often seems to function more as a roadmap to a dark but realistic underworld of young unsupervised teens drifting from one unsavory experience to another. A conclusion that seems implausibly optimistic, considering the life Cassie's recently led, slaps a bandage on an oozing sore. (Fiction. 14 & up)

VOYA - C. J. Bott

In this sad, dark book with pain-filled characters, thirteen-year-old Cassie is the new girl at school trying to recreate herself. During her transition, she is attracted to Alex, an intimidating, abusive manipulator who leads Cassie into boys, drugs, and sex. Cassie goes willingly, but during her first sexual experience, she watches from the ceiling in an out-of-body experience and later showers in scalding water—both common to rape victims. Frail and fading, Sarah, Alex's half-sister, has been sexually abused by her father since she was little—the scars prove the abuse Sarah does not remember. Messed-up and absent in her own life, Cassie wants to protect Sarah. The target audience is questionable with a main character of thirteen; most middle schools will not teach this book, and high school students rarely read about thirteen year olds. The gift in this book is Reed's ability to find the perfect words and use them in ways for which the reader is not ready. The writing is lonely, haunting, sensuous, and oddly beautiful. Reviewer: C. J. Bott