All We Ever Wanted Was Everything: A Novel

by Janelle Brown

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Title	All We Ever Wanted Was Everything: A Novel
Author	Janelle Brown
Rating
Tags	read, fiction, book club, 2009 review
Collections	Your library
Your review	In All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, Janelle Brown introduces us to a family during their summer of one crisis after another. After 29 years of marriage, Janice Miller is stunned to learn, on the day her husband's Silicon Valley company makes a successful first stock offering, that he won't be coming home to celebrate their new wealth - he's leaving her for her best friend and tennis partner. Meanwhile, her elder daughter Margaret's finances are rapidly plummeting to the other end of the spectrum as her own business goes under, and teenage daughter Lizzie's social naivete is teaching her some hard lessons. Each of them is trying to cope with her problems in her own way, but none of their ways include much open communication with each other. Brown alternates the focus of each chapter among the three women, and her use of third-person narration gives the reader some insight into each of their perceptions of each other - and these are characters who seem to relate to their perceptions of each other more than to the actual person. There's a lot of reaction to the perceptions of others within the book, really. On the surface, especially in Janice's case, it looks a bit like too much concern about 'keeping up appearances,' especially since their upscale community is the kind of place where appearances seem to matter greatly - however, sometimes when the inner turmoil is just too much to deal with, attention to appearances can give a person some small sense of control over something. READ MORE: http://www.3rsblog.com/2009/07/monday...
Other authors 1
Publication	Spiegel & Grau (2009), Paperback, 448 pages
Publication date	2009
ISBN	0385524021 / 9780385524025
LC classification
Dewey	813
Subjects	Divorce › Fiction Domestic fiction Mothers and daughters › Fiction Rich people › Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County) › Fiction Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County, Calif.) › Fiction
Primary language eng	English
Secondary language	(blank)
Original language
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Date started
Date finished
Summary 1	All We Ever Wanted Was Everything: A Novel by Janelle Brown (2009)
Comments
BCID	XXX-
Number of copies	1
Citation	MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, Wikipedia citation
Data source	amazon.com