Teenage girls, with their fevered manias and languorous depressions, are unreliable narrators who rarely make sense out of their hormone-addled decisions until decades later. Hence, most coming-of-age novels wisely capture the inelegant state of growing up from a reasonable distance. In The Beginners, however, first-time novelist Rebecca Wolff tells her heroine's story from inside the bubble of passioned youth, and the result is a coming-of-age novel shot through with the same heady mix of conflicting perceptions as adolescence itself. With remarkably straightforward prose from this trapped-in-a-teenager's-head perspective, Wolff crafts a novel as intriguing, confusing and awash with dread as the dawn of adulthood itself.
Wick, an isolated, old mill town in the witch-burning region of Massachusetts, has a reservoir that was created by flooding neighboring towns. There, 15-year-old Ginger Pritt and her best friend, Cherry, are inseparable dreamers. But Ginger can feel the sickening onset of Cherry's boy craziness begin to forge a distance between them. The Motherwells, an outrageous, randy and unpredictable couple, drop into Wick and draw the two girls into their hypnotic world of adult conversation, sangria and indolence.
What are these rootless and urbane people doing in Wick? And why are they so interested in two teenage girls? Wolff's great accomplishment here is that the creeping sense of menace and mystery emanating from the Motherwells is tempered with a youthful innocence that thinks, hey, maybe they're just really cool people.
Loosely plotted and occasionally as still as the small-town summer days it depicts, The Beginner moves along to its disturbing dénouement on a cloud of obsession, abandon, confusion and regret. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic