Before the Beginning is the wonderful coming-of-age story of four friends on their schoolies week trip. Well, three friends and one uninvited sister. Throw in a mysterious and alluring stranger and a forbidden island and you have one of the most adventurous schoolies trips ever.
Grace has tagged along with her brother, Casper, and his friends, Elsie and Noah, on their schoolies trip because she has had a serious falling out with the judgmental girls she once called her friends. Casper is completely focused on his art that will hopefully see him enrolled in an art course at RMIT. So focused that he neglected to mention to the others that Grace would be joining them, which is awkward seeing as Grace isn’t part of their friendship group and they have a strained relationship at best. Noah is secretly struggling under the mountain that is his anxiety and how it may have just ruined the ATAR result he has been working so hard for and Elsie is just struggling to keep her friendship group together.
On their first night, the group meet the mysterious and enigmatic Sierra who draws them all in and convinces them to abandon their plans and join her camping on the remote, uninhabited island off the coast. Each of the teens are going through their own personal struggles and this island is the perfect place to undertake self discovery and find the answers to their questions. But Sierra has a secret she is hiding from the group and her motives for getting them onto the island are anything but pure.
As an older reader, the nostalgia in this book was overwhelming from the very first page! Schoolies week is a time honoured rite of passage for most teenagers. A week spent unsupervised, usually filled with partying and questionable decisions. It was an absolute pleasure to read from the first page to the very last. I loved that the setting and basic premise of this novel was so familiar. Morgan boosted this narrative by throwing in wonderfully complex characters, real life struggles, and a mystery that was a mix of fantasy and mythology.
Morgan has crafted five wonderfully complex characters in this novel. It was impressive how complete they felt in such a short book! The book is broken up into parts and each character controls a part of the story. Each character has their own stereotype: the responsible one, the activist, the overachiever, and the artistic one. Throughout each part of the book, we learn more about them, their home lives, and the experiences they have faced in their lives. Although this group has grown up together, we soon learn that they each have their own secrets and once they reach the island tensions begin to grow between Grace, Casper, Elsie, and Noah.
Sierra is a total enigma. She is desirable and charismatic and the group are instantly drawn to her. The reader is not provided much insight into her character as she has no formal chapters throughout however, every few chapters, there is an excerpt from an old dictionary of sea creature mythology and underneath, we see Sierra’s annotations. It is here that the reader soon realises that there is something different about her and perhaps she shouldn’t be trusted. The introduction of this classic sea mythology was a fun twist to this contemporary YA and it introduced another intriguing and mysterious element.
The most enjoyable thing about the book is the characters. They are so relatable! The book features flashbacks throughout to different times in the teens lives and I could honestly see myself in each of them, from stressing about exams, to struggling to cope at home and taking dangerous risks to try and feel a sense of control. It felt like an intense wave of nostalgia that wrapped me up from the very first page to the last. There is LGBTQ+ representation in the story and it touches on the negative attitude of the church community on the results of the Australian Marriage Equality Plebiscite in 2017. This shows support for the LGBTQ+ community and also introduces to readers who may not have experienced it before just how hard it can be when you grow up in a community that judges you for who you love.
There is a distinct lack of traditional “action” in this book but Morgan takes the reader and her characters on a wild journey of self-discovery and there is a real focus on not taking a journey like this on your own. Each character is struggling with their own issues alone and they are quite unsuccessful but when they ask for the help of their friends they learn about themselves and the bond between them grows and strengthens. This is a really important message for a YA novel. I didn’t learn things like this about myself until I was 26 and I wish I had had these insights when I was 18.
Before the Beginning is a truly wonderful read that gives so much in its relatively small package. It is a comforting coming-of-age story and will appeal to readers of all ages.
Before The Beginning is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
The story of four friends, a mysterious stranger, and the week when everything changed. For fans of We Were Liars.
Schoolies week: that strange in-between time when teenagers move from school into the adult world. It’s a week when anything is possible, and everything can change.
Grace is questioning everything she thought about herself, and has opted not to join her clique of judgemental friends for schoolies, instead tagging along with her brother Casper and his friends. Casper, an artist, is trying to create the perfect artwork for his uni application folio. Overachieving, anxiety-ridden Noah is reeling from a catastrophe that might have ruined his ATAR result. And Elsie is just trying to figure out how to hold their friendship group together.
On the first night of the trip, they meet Sierra, a mysterious girl with silver-grey hair and a magnetic personality. All of them are drawn to her for different reasons, and she persuades them to abandon the cliched schoolies experience in favour of camping with her on a remote, uninhabited island. On that island, each of them will find answers to their questions. But what does Sierra want from them?
An empathetic and suspenseful coming-of-age story from the author of All That Impossible Space
