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All You Never Wanted
Unavailable
All You Never Wanted
Unavailable
All You Never Wanted
Audiobook6 hours

All You Never Wanted

Written by Adele Griffin

Narrated by Annalie Gernert and Erin Mallon

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

3/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

With my eyes closed and Alex's core friends all around me, it was like I'd become my big sister, or something just as good. And so who cared if they were calling it Alex's party? One thing I knew: it would be remembered as mine.

Alex has it all-brains, beauty, popularity, and a dangerously hot boyfriend. Her little sister Thea wants it all, and she's stepped up her game to get it. Even if it means spinning the truth to win the attention she deserves. Even if it means uncovering a shocking secret her older sister never wanted to share. Even if it means crying wolf.

Told in the alternating voices of Alex and Thea, Adele Griffin's mesmerizing new novel is the story of a sibling rivalry on speed.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 8, 2013
ISBN9780804123792
Unavailable
All You Never Wanted
Author

Adele Griffin

Adele Griffin (b. 1970) is a critically lauded author of children’s and young adult fiction. Born in Philadelphia, she began writing after college, when a job at a children’s publishing house introduced her to the world of young adult literature. She drew praise for her first novel, Rainy Season (1996), a heartfelt portrayal of a young American girl’s life in the Panama Canal Zone in the late 1970s. In books like Sons of Liberty (1997) and Amandine (2001), she continued to explore the sometimes harsh realities of family life, and become known for intuitive, honest, and realistic fiction. Over the past several years, Griffin has won a number of awards, including National Book Award nominations for Sons of Liberty (1997) and Where I Want to Be (2005). Her books are regularly cited on ALA Best and ALA Notable lists. A number of her novels, such as the four-book Witch Twins series, introduce an element of lighthearted fantasy. Griffin lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.      

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Reviews for All You Never Wanted

Rating: 2.8787854545454548 out of 5 stars
3/5

33 ratings15 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    See the full review at Short & Sweet Reviews.

    Ever read a book where you finish it and realize you have absolutely no sympathy for any of the characters? Even if you should? That's how I felt about Alex and Thea in All You Never Wanted. These are girls who are handed everything they could ever want, thanks to their new, wealthy step-father. On the surface, their lives look easy, but problems lurk underneath the surface, making their lives anything but the fairy-tale stories that they appear to be. Alex is popular and pretty and has opportunities given to her right and left, but is also dealing with a pretty debilitating anxiety disorder. Thea, her younger sister, used to be kind of nerdy and bookish, but as Alex declines, Thea sees a way to climb her way to the top, inventing a new, devious persona to escape her less-than-cool past and get what she wants.

    Both of our narrators here are very unreliable, Thea especially. It's established early on that she's manipulative and a liar, willing to do anything to climb the social ladder. So it's easy to question everything she does, right up until the closing pages of the book. I don't have anything against unreliable narrators -- it's an interesting technique that keeps a reader on their toes if done well -- but Thea was so absolutely unsympathetic of a character that I lost interest in trying to wade through her lies very early on. By the end, there was a large part of me that just didn't care what happened to Thea. I just wanted Alex to get out of all of her dysfunctional relationships and start over.

    There are a couple of moments in this book that made me stop and go "WAIT YOU'RE KIDDING ME". There's a huge insta-love thing between Alex and Xander; they share hardly any page time at all before she's realizing that she loves him and suddenly starts making drastic changes in her life. Like, it's a positive thing for Alex that helps her cope with her anxiety, but as a reader it made me want to throw things.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Listened to the book. Didn't like the reader but I stuck it out. It touches on a lot issues facing teen girls.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Wow--this was realistic fiction, in the best sense. Sibling rivalry taken to a believable extreme, believable because of the underlying emotions that spawned it. And great writing, too: dialog, pacing, imagery. A definite recommend for high school students.Few teens might relate to the rags to riches story of these sisters, but the sibling conflicts are spot-on. Alex is the cool and popular older sister; Thea is the nerdy younger sister. Thea has always leaned on Alex for emotional support, while admiring her sister's assets. When rags turn to riches after their single Mom marries Mr. Deep Pockets, they start to change, and neither of them for the better. While Alex's changes are mental and physical, Thea's changes are more sociopathic. She turns her cleverness to spinning damaging lies. The twist in this story is unexpected, and leads to an ending I couldn't have foreseen. I'm not sure I'm even happy with this ending, because it leaves one sister's fate completely up in the air. But the story was engaging, and kept me going. I will read more of this author.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Wow it was terrible. I was hoping for a good portrayal of anorexia or a satire of the hypocrisies of the rich, but no, it's just a vapid story about vapid teenage girls. Avoid.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Bitchy sisters who're really needy and fucked up. Poor little rich girls and the dudes that hang onto them. Great snapshot of some fucked up people within a slice of a weekend. Griffin's language is beautiful and Thea's POV is especially fun to read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Ales is the older sister, beautiful and smart. She has developed nervous disorders and anorexia. Thea, the younger sister, wants to be popular, and tells stories if she believes it will make her more interesting and accepted. How far will Thea go to get what she wants - what her sister had?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Over the past year, I've been discovering a love for realistic fiction, my home base having always been fantasy novels for pretty much all of my YA-reading past. When I was an actual teen, my favorite genre to read was chick lit: humor, sexy times, and a hot man for every woman; I pretty much hoped that would be my future. As I've gotten older and seen that this would not be my future, these happy novels have failed to move me most of the time, seeming much less realistic than their depressing counterparts. With Adele Griffin, I have found another author who writes books full of broken characters and feels.

    At its core, All You Never Wanted is the story of two sisters, Thea and Alex. Both are broken, unable to exist comfortably in their own skins. They used to be happy, even after their parents' divorce and father's abandonment. What undid them was their mother's remarriage. Interestingly enough, the problem was not Arthur, the mother's new husband, who treats them well and would do anything for them. The issue is his wealth, and that he travels so much on business, taking their mother with him.

    During the time where they had very little money, both girls working to help the family scrape buy and pay the bills, the three of them were a tight family unit. They were close and happy. With the money and resulting luxury, the three have grown apart. More separate and free, the two girls find it hard to figure out who they are or how to behave. The fact that both are classic 'poor little rich girls' is made less obnoxious by their acknowledgment and distaste of that fact, as well as by the fact that they have not always been this way.

    Alex speeds toward hermit status, afraid to leave Camelot (the name of their immense house) because of a traumatic experience she had during her internship at a fashion magazine. She withdraws more and more, skipping school, shutting out her boyfriend and sister, refusing to eat, and only barely managing to continue tutoring at Empty Hands, a volunteer center. This last may seem the least important, but her work there, kids like Leonard who count on her, are the only tether keeping her from closing herself inside permanently.

    Thea has always worshipped her prettier, older, better-liked sister. Before, Thea was a nerd, who delighted in essay contests and winning trophies for academic achievement. As Alex disappears, Thea overcompensates for the loss of her idol by trying to become Alex, single white female style. No longer caring about her grades, she throws herself into a web of lies in an effort to entertain the highest echelon in her high school, to become one of the popular kids. On top of that, Thea wants Alex's boyfriend, Joshua.

    Griffin uses an interesting narrative style to accomplish this tale: Thea's perspective is first person, and Alex's third person limited. This can be a tricky technique to pull off with multiple perspectives, but Griffin does so marvelously. Thea's personality fits a first person narration perfectly, since she's such a storyteller. She wants to be able to tell the audience what's going on in her life her way, put her spin on it and make it a better story. Alex has no desire to be known, feels foreign even to herself.

    I ripped through this brief novel, caught up in the drama and pain of their lives. My biggest issue with the book is that I just could not believe the truth of Alex's trauma once I heard it. Call me a terrible person, but I definitely laughed, though it does allow for a nice joke at the end. Also, complex and real as they were, I never bonded with Alex and Thea. Of the two, though, I liked Alex best, despite her weird issue, especially since she has a touching romantic story line.

    From what I've heard, this is not Griffin's best novel, but, even so, I can tell that I need to read more Griffin. Her writing has a unique flair and she does not turn away from darkness. Given its brevity, this is well worth a read if you find the concept intriguing or have enjoyed Griffin before. This would make a great readalike for Denise Jaden's Never Enough or Sarah Wylie's All These Lives.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dark, but compelling. Thea and Alex share the narration of one week in their moneyed, messed-up lives. Thea wants everything and wants to glory in the power and excess that their mother's marriage to noveau-riche, somewhat tacky, but kind Arthur has brought. Alex doesn't know how to handle going from a middle-class striver to a rich girl who's handed everything on a platter, so she tries wanting nothing - including food. Both miss their newly-absent - emotionally and often physically - mother. As the week progresses the girls move on their separate trajectories - Alex towards hope and healing through caring about others and Thea towards somewhere much darker helped along by the outrageous lies she fashions. The two girls are perfectly wrought as are most of the characters (Joshua and Arthur), but Xander is a wee bit too exactly what Alex needs and the mother remains a cipher. Also, now that I think about it, where are Thea's former friends? Alex has friends who at least try to be supportive although they are only somewhat successful, but Thea's friends are all gone once her one boyfriend moved away? Consequences, actions and reactions are cleverly illuminated so that both girls' journeys seem inevitable. The mystery of what happened to Alex at her Haute internship is tense and built up to seem horrible and the choice of incident is perfectly banal and humiliating and horrifying. The love, tenderness, competition and jealousy between Thea and Alex are well-balanced to show the complexity of their relationship. This is good stuff; the more I think about it, the more I like it, particularly because it could just be read on the level of a Gossip Girl novel, but holds so much more.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Adele Griffin is one of very few authors on my automatic-read list. After reading and being entranced by her novel Tighter, I knew that Adele was magic and that I must get my hands on everything she writes. She did not disappoint with ALL YOU NEVER WANTED. This book was indeed a story of sibling rivalry, on speed, just like the synopsis says. I couldn't put it down. It was this crazy tail-spin, nose-dive, downward spiral, bottlenecking story that just didn't stop.

    Alex is wasting away. Ever since that terrible thing happened, she's been starving herself. She is little more than a shell of who she used to be. She was once the queen of the school, pretty, with the most popular friends and most sought-after boyfriend. But then that thing happened. And she's never been the same.

    But underneath that Barbie-doll exterior, there is something more to Alex. She is kind and thoughtful. She loves deeply. She is hurting, from her father's abandonment and her mother's remarriage. And even though most days she can't even pull herself out of bed (or her car out of the driveway) Alex is still hopeful.

    Thea is crazy, though. She envies her older sister like any younger sibling would, but she takes it way, way too far. She spun the craziest lies and a web of stories, for no other reason than to get attention from Alex's popular friends. She spreads nasty rumors about innocent classmates. She makes up wild and incredulous stories about herself, always making herself the hero. Even though I was in Thea's head, I couldn't tell where the truth ended and the lies began. So when she took it too far, it was hard to say whether it was true or not. You didn't want it to be true, but it would crush you to think she lied about something that serious.

    ALL YOU NEVER WANTED was emotionally exhausting. Trying to wade through all of Thea's lies, to get to the bottom of her character and what make's her Thea. All the while rooting Alex on in her struggles to face her past and move toward her present. It hurt to read this book, but that doesn't take away from it in any way. Adele Griffin's writing is beautiful and bold and her characters are true to life and pop right out of the pages.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Did not finish. When I'm choosing to do everything else in the world BUT read the book and it's taken over three days to get to page 75, then I'm never going to end up finishing it. I wish I liked it and maybe I'll pick it up another time.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This one was kind of a surprise. The blurb on the book jacket makes sibling rivalry the main focus of the story (it's told from the alternating viewpoint of sisters Alex and Thea), but I think the most interesting aspect of the book is Alex's inner turmoil, which Griffin describes in a very vivid, visceral way that made me feel literally anxious. Actually, Griffin's descriptions are excellent all around: "Lulette smells sweet. If Alex had to assign her a signature perfume, she'd call it Lipstick Print on a Warm Glass of Coke."What I didn't like about this book was its ambivalent ending. I like some closure, thank you very much.I think this book would appeal mainly to teen girls and young adult women. Griffin deftly tackles the cruel world of high school and the equally cruel things we do to our own minds and bodies.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I may have enjoyed this novel more if I had actually been able to stomach any of the characters. As it stands, I finished this simply to see how it ended, but I didn't enjoy it. The writing wasn't bad, which is why I rated this with a D instead of an F. I just didn't enjoy the subject matter or the characters at all. I thought this would be different than it was. Fans of depressing contemporary will probably love this. I, however, did not. One of my complaints with these characters is the binary aspect of it. Thea is an intelligent character who is more comfortable with a book than a group of people. However, as she discovers her sister's life, she wants to steal it from her basically. It's disgusting, if you ask me. Of course no one asked me, so I guess that doesn't matter. But since it's my blog, it's kind of like I'm being asked, so I'm telling. Alex is a bit whiny and over dramatic, in my opinion. I didn't like her much either, and I certainly didn't buy her love for Xander. The plot was different, but I just didn't like it. I don't like lies and jealousy and the like to the degree that they're exhibited here. I don't like them at all, but at least in books they normally make for a good story. Not in this case. Thea just did one crappy thing after another, and I kind of hated her a lot. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this story to people who don't like reading from a brat's perspective. Or in this case, two brats' perspectives.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I know there are mixed reviews out there on this one, and honestly I’m stuck somewhere in the middle. On a small level, this is the story of two sisters that suffer the devastating effects of becoming nouveau rich. On a much larger and deeper level, however, this is a story of sibling rivalry… and that story is dark and troubled. Thea is the younger sister tired living in Alex’s shadow. She has developed this image of what her life should be like and it eats away at her. It consumes her, really. Thea’s story sucks you in from the beginning. She is so screwed up that you can’t help but continue to read because you want to find out where that train wreck is heading. And what a train wreck she is! Is she crazy? Yes, but that’s an understatement. Border line psychotic? Oh yeah. Pathological liar? Mmm, yep. An endangerment to herself and those around her? Right again! Like I said, complete train wreck. While Thea’s highly disturbing story unfolds, the mystery surrounding Alex’s neurosis also unravels. You can tell that Alex was once this amazing person (that probably wasn’t too likeable), but her unfortunate “event” has left her scared and damaged. So is so damaged, in fact, that she is allowing herself to fade away—literally. She’s got a plate full of issues to handle too! So yes, I thought the story behind these two sisters was very interesting. Compelling even. I was captivated for the most part. But the other characters did not hit the mark for me, and I think they took away from the book as a whole. For starters, Alex’s boyfriend was a douche bag. Barf. I understand the purpose he played, but geez. Then there was Xander… I really liked Xander, but the whole Alex-Xander “thing” was too rushed. It happened so quickly. In one paragraph the entire orbit of this book changed and I wasn’t fully buying it. Sorry. I’m happy with the ending. I think it worked, even if it left a lot of questions unanswered. I can certainly say there is no neat little bow ending to annoy you, and that is commendable. Overall, I think what could have been a phenomenal story was rushed in places, which ultimately took away from the force of the story between the covers. It was still a good read for older YA readers, but not my favorite in this genre.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Adele Griffin is one of very few authors on my automatic-read list. After reading and being entranced by her novel Tighter, I knew that Adele was magic and that I must get my hands on everything she writes. She did not disappoint with ALL YOU NEVER WANTED. This book was indeed a story of sibling rivalry, on speed, just like the synopsis says. I couldn't put it down. It was this crazy tail-spin, nose-dive, downward spiral, bottlenecking story that just didn't stop.

    Alex is wasting away. Ever since that terrible thing happened, she's been starving herself. She is little more than a shell of who she used to be. She was once the queen of the school, pretty, with the most popular friends and most sought-after boyfriend. But then that thing happened. And she's never been the same.

    But underneath that Barbie-doll exterior, there is something more to Alex. She is kind and thoughtful. She loves deeply. She is hurting, from her father's abandonment and her mother's remarriage. And even though most days she can't even pull herself out of bed (or her car out of the driveway) Alex is still hopeful.

    Thea is crazy, though. She envies her older sister like any younger sibling would, but she takes it way, way too far. She spun the craziest lies and a web of stories, for no other reason than to get attention from Alex's popular friends. She spreads nasty rumors about innocent classmates. She makes up wild and incredulous stories about herself, always making herself the hero. Even though I was in Thea's head, I couldn't tell where the truth ended and the lies began. So when she took it too far, it was hard to say whether it was true or not. You didn't want it to be true, but it would crush you to think she lied about something that serious.

    ALL YOU NEVER WANTED was emotionally exhausting. Trying to wade through all of Thea's lies, to get to the bottom of her character and what make's her Thea. All the while rooting Alex on in her struggles to face her past and move toward her present. It hurt to read this book, but that doesn't take away from it in any way. Adele Griffin's writing is beautiful and bold and her characters are true to life and pop right out of the pages.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love Adele Griffin. I love the strength of her voice, the intense and multi-dimensional characters she creates, and the landscapes she's able to build whether working in a realistic or a magical world.Right now I'm in love with her book ALL YOU NEVER WANTED, a "poor little rich girl(s)" story, in which two sisters have undergone not-so-subtle psychological changes after their mother married a wealthy man and they went from living hand-to-mouth with part time jobs and knock-off clothes to having way fancy cars, living in a McMansion, and going from known to notorious in school.Alex was always the pretty, popular, everyone-wants-to-be-her sister. And she wishes she could still be that girl, in a way. But the problem is, her stepdad's connections got her this amazing internship, and this summer should have been amazing. But something happened that lead her to run away from the internship. And now she can barely get her car out of the driveway. She doesn't want to eat, can hardly function, and her disinterest in her boyfriend is pushing him away.Her sister Thea can't stand it. She's climbing tooth and nail into the popular crowd, and Alex's behavior is devastating her chances of reinventing herself. Thea also knows it's wrong to be crushing on Alex's guy, but it's obvious they've always had a connection. And while Alex is concerned for her sister's health, and wonders why she's actually participating in the charity program their Greenwich school set up for seniors and not blowing it off like everyone else.But like in any family, there are secrets. Like what happened to Alex at her internship. And the guy she's working with, helping kids with homework in the Bronx. The really really hot guy. And it's all coming to a head as both girls plan an ill-advised party-to-end-all-parties for the same night at their house.This beautifully written, intriguingly dark, and one hundred percent unputdownable novel is the kind I'm hoping to see shiny stickers on come award season. Adele Griffin has composed another masterpiece. Do yourself a favor, and read it!