Everything Beautiful
Pan Macmillan, 16.99 pb, 278 pp
Everything Beautiful by Simmone Howell
Just as God created the earth in seven days, Simmone Howell’s Everything Beautiful rebuilds the life of sixteen-year-old Riley Rose in a week spent at a Christian summer camp.
Two years after the death of her mother, Lilith (an allusion to Adam’s first wife), atheist Riley has become the quintessential bad girl – smoking, drinking and getting arrested. On the advice of her father’s new girlfriend, Riley is sentenced to a seven-day stint at the Spirit Ranch holiday camp, with nothing but a new hairstyle, a copy of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and, courtesy of her best friend, a bus ticket home.
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