In Robyn Schneider’s The Beginning of Everything, the title itself evokes the theme of the story: that tragedy may divide one’s life but it does not mean that it can define who one is, how one lives, and who one loves. The truth is, tragedy is unavoidable.

The novel’s protagonist is Ezra Faulkner a eighteen year old boy who knows firsthand what tragedy is and recounts his belief that sooner or later tragedy changes everyone’s “before” and “after.”

Ezra at first questions himself saying, “Sometimes I think that everyone has a tragedy waiting for them.. That everyone’s life, no matter how unremarkable, has a moment when it will become extraordinary-a single encounter after which everything that really matters will happen.”

With that he thinks and questions “Well, who am I really?” He was once the golden boy of his junior class, star of the varsity tennis team,  class president, and was supposed to be prom king. This was all before the tragedy that made him become extraordinary within himself.

Ezra’s tragedy was particularly awaited till’ it was prime for him to lose it all his junior year in just one night, when all of a sudden a reckless driver shatters his knee, his athletic career, and his social life.

Ezra, now with a cane at his side, books in his hands, and with a future ahead of himself realizes how far he has come since the accident that became his tragedy. New girl, Cassidy Thorpe “lent a spark or tendered the flame” in which later Ezra claims that the “arson was his” that truly ignited the fire.

At the end, Ezra claims that it was Cassidy that changed him as in the person he was before the accident, but realizes after Cassidy explains that it was him who changed him no one else. Meaning that, it is no one else but you, that gets you through.  

Oscar Wilde once said, “that to live is the rarest thing in the world, because most people just exist, and that’s all.”

All Ezra did the majority of his life was exist, but he truly learns through his tragedy is to live. What audiences can learn and take from this novel is that tragedies are inevitable and are extraordinarily unremarkable. Through his hardships, Ezra teaches that anything is possible and there is always another way, life can be unreliable sometimes, so live and don’t just exist.

Critics’ review it as a witty and heart wrenching teen novel, more of an combination of a John Green and Ned Vizzini novel. Also has been seen and compared to other novels such as The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Gatsby. The novel has received generally positive reviews since published in August 27, 2013.