Glee – the Beginning is a warm-up book for the TV series Glee, which is a musical comedy about McKinley high school’s teenagers. The book was released in 2010 (same year as the show came up), and it was written by Sophia Lowell.
The main characters of this book are the Glee members Rachel Berry, Kurt Hummel, Mercedes Jones, Artie Abrams and Tina Cohen-Chang. For them high school isn’t easy. Especially when the popular kids of the school are trying to ruin all the good things they have in school. For example choir, Glee club. That makes even harder to make glee success. Glee is also known as musical TV series, where the actors and actresses sing nearly the whole time. Of course that’s a little hard to include in a book, but still you can feel the music around you almost the whole time while reading the book.
Besides the Glee members, the book is about the popular kids in McKinley high ; cheerleaders and footballers. As all of you who have ever watched Glee might now many of the footballers and Cheerios are eventually joining Glee club. But during this book almost everyone of them is trying to ruin glee members’ life. They still have their own problems. Finn Hudson the quarterback of the football team, who is dating Quinn Fabray, the head cheerleader, has a secret crush on Rachel Berry. Quinn in turn doesn’t actually even like Finn, just the picture of him together with her. Quinn’s actual love is the football team’s bad boy Noah ”Puck” Puckerman, which doesn’t quite picture Quinn’s dream boyfriend, so that’s why she is dating Finn. It was exciting to see how these relationships were before the series. And especially how the relationships move ahead.
For me it’s easy to imagine these characters because I’ve watched the TV series also. And I have really began to like them. But for a person who have never heard about glee might these characters be a little weird, at least I felt that way at first. But I’m sure everybody can find a character to identify with glee. Glee has every kind of students; latin, gay, black, white etc. And it tells about everyone’s secrets and fears which makes it easy to identify with.
The narration of this book changes from time to time. Usually one chapter is told by one of the main character; thoughts, feelings and words. Chapters were named according to the place and time were something was about to happen. Because of that you could usually guess who was the chapter about to tell. For instance choir room was often told by some of the glee kids. Like Rachel trying to train the other Glee kids look better on the stage.
I would recommend this book to a reader who likes comedy. And especially a teenager who likes to read about same kind of things are happening into her/his life. It was also easy to read at least for me, because I think the american accent the whole book is using is easy to understand because of present day’s big selection of american TV series. And even though it sometimes includes hard to understand words you eventually learn who to filter the less necessary words and you still get the main point.