The Beginning of Everything

Title: The Beginning of Everything
Author: Robyn Schneider
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Year Published: 2013
Pages: 335
Price: Rp. 124.000 at Periplus ; Rp. 99.000 at Books & Beyond ( paperback) // USD 17.09 at The Book Depository (hardback)

Ezra Faulkner once was a popular jock in high school. He was a tennis athlete. He dated a popular and pretty (but mean) girl named Charlotte, and he was the strongest homecoming king candidate. It all changed after a car accident hit him and made his feet badly injured.

After the accident, Ezra thought that he must leave his former clique because who was he without his tennis skill? So he restarted his school life and tried to find his new place by entering debate team with the new girl, Cassidy Thorpe, and his childhood best friend, Toby. Cassidy was such a unique and smart girl and it didn't take a long time for Ezra to fall in love with her. Life became interesting again, until he found out that Cassidy was hiding something, that maybe related to his past.

What will happen next? What secret does Cassidy hide?

This book was actually pretty interesting at first. Reading about how Ezra, the main character and also the narrator, opened the story with the incident happened in the amusement park years before the main story took place (which reminded me a lot with Detective Conan comic), and connected it with his condition, I had a high expectation on reading about how he moved on and dealt with his personal tragedy in sarcastic and witty voice. But what I got was nothing closer to it.

The whole story fell boring and flat for me. And Ezra's character didn't bring sympathy to me. While his former clique didn't actually ditch him after what happened to him, Ezra himself lost his confident and felt that he no longer belong to the popular clique so that he decided to be alone until his childhood friend, Toby, asked him to join the debate team. The self confident issue seems okay and understandable since Ezra had lost all his pride but his failure to decide which clique he wanted to be with was so annoying to read. He kept switching between having lunch with the populars and hanging out with the debate teammates without effort in making these two groups accept each other. Well, at least if you know that they two won't mix, just decide which group you want to be part of the most, Ezra!

And the romance.. I don't know, but I can't relate to Cassidy Thorpe at all. At first she appeared as this unique, smart and mysterious new girl, but that's all. And after her secret was revealed, I was like.. Oh really?? I couldn't feel the chemistry between Ezra and Cassidy too.

Maybe the only favorite character who I like from this novel is Cooper the poodle. At least I can tell that his feeling to Ezra is genuine...