All the Dirty Parts

Daniel Handler

Aug 2017 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

About this ebook

From bestselling, award-winning author Daniel Handler, a gutsy, exciting novel that looks honestly at the erotic impulses of an all-too-typical young man.

Cole is a boy in high school. He runs cross country, he sketches, he jokes around with friends. But none of this quite matters next to the allure of sex. “Let me put it this way,” he says. “Draw a number line, with zero is, you never think about sex and ten is, it's all you think about, and while you are drawing the line, I am thinking about sex.”

Cole fantasizes about whomever he's looking at. He consumes and shares pornography. And he sleeps with a lot of girls, which is beginning to earn him a not-quite-savory reputation around school. This leaves him adrift with only his best friend for company, and then something startling starts to happen between them that might be what he's been after all this time-and then he meets Grisaille.


All the Dirty Parts is an unblinking take on teenage desire in a culture of unrelenting explicitness and shunted communication, where sex feels like love, but no one knows what love feels like. With short chapters in the style of Jenny Offill or Mary Robison, Daniel Handler gives us a tender, brutal, funny, intoxicating portrait of an age when the lens of sex tilts the world. “There are love stories galore,” Cole tells us. “This isn't that. The story I'm typing is all the dirty parts.”

Ratings and reviews

I received a review copy from Bloomsbury India in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are entirely my own. The minute I read the synopsis of this book, I was intrigued, to say the very least. I’ve always thought that the more knowledge adolescents have about sex, the more informed decisions they can make about any matter relating to it. Which is to say, I went into this expecting it to be something GOOD. I finished the entire book in little more than an hour and, at this point, I’M HONESTLY NOT SURE HOW TO REVIEW THIS BOOK AT ALL. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever read before and like the description promises, it was purely about sex, from the mind of a ‘horny’ teenager talking only about ‘All The Dirty Parts’ in a cut prose. MY THOUGHTS: 1. Despite the fact that the description of this book PROMISES that this isn’t a love story of any sort, and that it only contains all the dirty parts, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that I wanted something MORE from the main character in terms of character and development. 2. I guess I didn’t want a love story, per se, but I wanted a little more of a STORY instead of just descriptions of sex. 3. I really liked Daniel Handler’s writing style. I’ve seen Lemony Snicket on TV with family, but I haven’t actually read any of his books. It was definitely an interesting style of writing with broken, cut away prose that reads SOMEWHAT like verse, but isn’t. The writing DEFINITELY suited the plot of the book, and that made my reading experience that much better. 4. The descriptions in this book were all kinds of crazy. At first, I was a little shocked at how graphic everything about this book was but I got over that. There was also a lot of diversity in terms of same sex relationships and a lot of experimentation which I really liked. 5. Despite the fact that there WAS a same sex relationship, I absolutely HATED the way Cole treated his best friend. He honestly acted like a Grade A Dirtbag and I felt horrible for him. 6. ALSO, CAN I HONESTLY TALK ABOUT HOW COLE’S MONOLOGUES AT THE ENDING CONFUSED ME? Because they did, and I STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT TO MAKE OF HIM. I HAVE to give this book points for Originality and while it stayed true to its title and description I can’t help but with that there was a little more to Cole as a character. 3 stars.

Good Book

About the author

Daniel Handler is the author of the novels We Are Pirates, The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, Adverbs, and Why We Broke Up, a 2012 Michael L. Printz Honor Book. He is responsible for many books for children, including the thirteen-volume sequence A Series of Unfortunate Events and the four-book series All the Wrong Questions. He is married to the illustrator Lisa Brown and lives with her and their son in San Francisco.