Book Review: ALL WE HAD by Annie Weatherwax

 

 

 FACTS ABOUT THE BOOK

Title: All We Had
Author: Annie Weatherwax
Publisher: Simon and Schuster US
Price: $16.00
Pages: 257
Genre: Novel (Poverty, Mother-Sister, Drama)
Year: 2014

 

 

BACK OF THE BOOK (warning! this is more a summary of the whole book than a teaser - it bascially spoilers almost the whole story)

 

Source: Amazon

 

 

Thirteen-year-old Ruthie Carmichael and her mother, Rita, share a powerful bond. Always teetering on the edge of poverty, they are sustained by their grit, humor, and love for each other. When they take to the highway in search of the American Dream, they end up in Fat River, New York, where Rita finally lands a steady job at the local diner. Peter Pam, the diner's transgender waitress; Dotty and Hank Hanson, the elderly owners of the hardware store battling for survival in the Walmart era; and Miss Frankfurt, the stern but caring principal of the high school, form Ruthie and Rita's makeshift family. But into this quirky utopia comes a smooth-talking mortgage broker who entices Rita with a subprime loan. Within months, the financial crisis hits and the fragile life they have built unravels. Faced with the prospect of homelessness, Ruthie and Rita pay a brutal price that changes their lives forever.

 

A stirring portrayal of two unforgettable women up against America's most recent recession, All We Had heralds the arrival of a powerful new voice in fiction. Annie Weatherwax's captivatingly honest and often darkly hilarious novel is an emotionally resonant and pitch-perfect debut.

 

 

 

MY THOUGHTS ON IT

So I had to read this book for a seminar and therefore expected it to deal with abortion in some way, since the seminar is mainly about that - but the book didn't. So it wasn't at all what I expected but I'm nevertheless quite looking forward to discussing it in the seminar.

 

It felt like quite an unconventional book to me because I don't normally read books like this one, but it was definitely I nice change.

 

With its 257 pages it's quite short but contains a lot of content and a lot happens in it.

 

At the beginning, the narrator, a 13-year-old girl who grows up during the book, came across very angry and vengeful to me and I don't think I've ever read a story with characters as broke and messed up as the mother and daughter in this one. But the fact that they were so poor and therefore so ruthless and reckless in their behaviour made the book actually quite thrilling to read because they always went to such extremes that were sometimes hard to read. I often didn't even want to imagine what I was reading. For example when they pulled out an infected teeth with their bare hands or when they described the dirt and mess they were living in.

 

The book felt quite controversial, unusual and thought-provoking which I really liked because its main characters were just so different to characters I normally read about.

 

This book did portray men in the absolute worst light and did not really leave any room for exceptions to the assumption that all men are predators. That attitude towards men made the book feel even angrier to me but there is the slight acknowledgement of Ruthie, that her mother brings out the worst in men which gives Rita some responsibility for the behaviour of the men - but in general, it is no wonder that Ruthie says in the end that she can't trust women and is afraid of men.

 

What surprised me a lot in this book was the shining character that was Peter Pam. It's hard to describe Peter Pam in my opinion, even though the back of the book calls her transgender, I'm not sure if she really is because I didn't read the back of the book before I finished reading the book and for me she was a drag queen. Peter created this character called Peter Pam and dressed up to become her. Either way, Peter Pam was definitely a highlight of this story. She reminded me a bit of Lafayette from True Blood now that I think about it.

The writing style of it made it even more thrilling to read because the chapters were relatively short and always titled with a noun that gave away the general mood of the chapter which I found very fascinating. There were chapters titled "Anger", "Hunger", "Humiliation", "Loyalty" or "Perversion". It always made one wonder what this would mean and how the following chapter would portray this word. I think that was a well-chosen strategy to keep the interest in the reader high.

 

I felt like this book was brutally real when it came to depicting the lives of poor people in the US and I wasn't prepared for how raw it was in its honesty. It's definitely not a comforting book but a book that makes you think and that confronts you with a reality that is easier to forget about but is so important to read and talk about because poverty exists and needs to be talked about.

 

My copy of the book promotes the movie adaption directed by and starring Katie Holmes on its front cover and I am quite curious as to how she put this story on the screen, so hopefully I'll watch it soon or maybe we'll even watch it in the seminar.

 

 

 

 

RATING

I award this book with 4 out of 5 stars.