I picked it up because it was getting comparisons to The Fault in Our Stars, which is a pretty good YA book, but it quickly became apparent to me that The Beginning of Everything was not going to be good. Like, at all. I powered through the whole thing because I wanted to finish my Goodreads book challenge, but it really wasn't worth the few hours. 
 Again, like some of the reviews have mentioned, the plot sounds like it'll be good, which is why I picked it up. Ezra Faulkner is this jock golden boy who gets into a car accident, questions his life, meets Manic Pixie Dream Girl Cassidy, falls in love and attributes his change in personality and ambitions to her, but later realizes those changes actually stemmed from himself, and that he's growing to become a person he likes. I mean, that's pretty empowering coming-of-age stuff, right? 
 But the execution of this book is - actually kinda terrible. Maybe because the dialogue tried too hard to be snappy (it was almost never funny), or the novel itself tried too hard to be profound, or the constant pop culture and literary references kept winking at me from every paragraph... But actually, what irked me most was the classism underlying a lot of the characters' interactions. Of course these teens, living in huge Southern Californian mansions, could buy $500 dresses for homecoming and go to chain restaurants ironically. Of course you get a passing juxtaposition of the "Spanish-style" houses with the "illegal migrant workers" in the strawberry fields - a juxtaposition that goes nowhere beyond the author pointing out that these two things exist alongside each other. (Really, just call a spade a spade - we get it, they're Mexican and poor, maybe undocumented. Was the author actually going to engage substantively on that issue, or just keep throwing the "migrant workers" casually into the text to underscore how ridiculous all these rich white teens were being?) 
 Why are the characters so flat and stereotypical? (We get it. Charlotte is a dumb, blonde cheerleader who doesn't understand when Ezra uses big words. She does, however, have fantastic boobs. Seriously? In this day and age, we're still setting up this ridiculous dichotomy of what it means to be the "right" kind of girl?) 
 Why are we supposed to care at all about Cassidy, who goes around saying patently offensive things about prosecco being "poor man's champagne"? I get that she gets to have her moment of breaking out of the MPDG mold, in a speech that sounds a lot like Clementine's electrifying speech to Joel in Eternal Sunshine ("Too many guys think I'm a concept, or I complete them, or I'm gonna make them alive. But I'm just a fucked-up girl looking for her own peace of mind. Don't assign me yours."), but damn, Cassidy's is a lot less effective than Clementine's. Mostly because we don't actually see this fucked-upness. We see a rich teen girl throwing a tantrum because of her poorly kept secret about her brother, and her breaking up with her boyfriend. In the grand scheme of things, that barely scrapes the surface of fucked-upness; it actually just sounds like a teen girl being a teen girl. In short, as much as I loathe the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, I can't even buy Cassidy as a convincing MPDG because - let's actually be real. She's a rich girl playing at being quirky and interesting. Oh, yes, let's sneer at the fact that Ezra has never really traveled elsewhere, whereas she's lived all over Europe. Yeah, no, only people with money get to go fuck off to do a summer at Oxford before they've even finished high school. Her idea of convincing Ezra to be more interesting and true to himself is to get him to upgrade his wardrobe from high school Abercrombie jock to leather jacket wearing, coffee-shop inhabiting hipster brooder. Maybe this is the point, that Cassidy doesn't really do that much for Ezra's transformation in the end, but I can't even buy this as faux-quirky. It's just an alt-version of Charlotte dragging Ezra to the mall to douse him in Abercrombie. 
 Anyway I've spent longer on this review than I should for a book I'm rating 2 stars. (The 2 stars are for the promising direction the plot indicated the novel going in.) Maybe because I usually find it harder to write reviews about things I actually like. Anyway, TBOE was at times, pretty dull and predictable, and at other times, actually rage-inducing. 
 Edit: Dropped to 1 star. It really wasn't good.