The Open Book

All of Us and Everything by Bridget Asher is a quirky little read. The Rockwell women, sisters Esme, Liv, Ru, their mother Augusta and Esme's teenage daughter Atty (who is a joy and a gift to this novel), come together at the family home after Hurricane Katrina unearths some family secrets. Each of them are at a particularly tumultuous time in their lives and bring a lot of baggage to the reunion, which of course leads to thinly veiled tension and dramatic revelations. The story works best when it's running on a dry, sardonic blend of humour and light pathos, but somewhere around the halfway point it veers a bit into the ridiculous and that's where it loses me. I think I was expecting one type of story in the first half and then suddenly it slips into farce, and while I love a good farce, it's a bit discombobulating to have it show up out of nowhere. Particularly frustrating is the fact that there were a lot of intriguing elements to the story, they just never quite seemed to fit together so it all feels a bit patchwork. Would I read another novel by Asher? Yes. Absolutely. But I'd probably borrow it from the library first.