Review: All That We Carried

 

All That We Carried

About the Book

Ten years ago, sisters Olivia and Melanie Greene were on a backcountry hiking trip when their parents were in a fatal car accident. Over the years, they grew apart, each coping with the loss in her own way. Olivia plunged herself into law school, work, and a materialist view of the world--what you see is what you get, and that's all you get. Melanie dropped out of college and developed an online life-coaching business around her cafeteria-style spirituality--a little of this, a little of that, whatever makes you happy.

Now, at Melanie's insistence (and against Olivia's better judgment), they are embarking on a hike in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In this remote wilderness they'll face their deepest fears, question their most dearly held beliefs, and begin to see that perhaps the best way to move forward is the one way they had never considered.

Michigan Notable Book Award winner Erin Bartels draws from personal experience hiking backcountry trails with her sister to bring you a story about the complexities of grief, faith, and sisterhood.

My Comments

I loved it. 

When an elderly parent dies, hopefully the children mourn, but then life goes back to normal.  There is a sense of loss, and sadness, but there is also the realization that death is a part of life and that it is going to happen to all of eventually.  However, when people die suddenly, well before old age, the loss can deeply upset family members, either pulling them apart or pushing them together in unhealthy ways.  

As noted above, after their parents died in a car accident, the older sister, Olivia, tried to remove as much random chance from her life as possible.  She was always prepared, she always planned.  Nothing bad was going to happen if she could help it.  Her younger sister tried to embrace everything--tarot and Catholicism, Islam and Buddhism.  As her sister noted, she avoided making the wrong choice by not making any choice.  Melanie is also an online persona who blogs, instagrams and vlogs, and makes money at it.  She's a life coach whose goal for her clients is happiness, though she hasn't been really happy since her parents died and her sister refused to speak to her.  She decides to try to repair the relationship with her sister through a back country hiking trip.

We follow the sisters as they follow Olivia's meticulously plotted plan--until they get lost and lose their map.  As things not on the agenda happen the sisters do eventually connect, with the help of a man they meet on the trail.  

The book is published by Revell, which is a Christian imprint.  Part of what each sister does during the incidents that take place in the book is to re-evaluate her religious beliefs.  I never got the impression that religion had been an important part of their childhood, but after the deaths of their parents, Olivia decided there couldn't be any loving God and Melanie had to believe there was something--she just wasn't ready to commit to any one belief.  There is no big "come to Jesus" moment, and, just out of curiosity, I ran a word search for "Jesus" and found the word only once, when Olivia was asking Melanie how Christians could be right about Jesus without other belief systems being wrong.  In short, while the book may be an invitation for you to consider  your religious beliefs, it is not a sermon encouraging you to adopt the author's beliefs.  

I enjoyed joining Olivia and Melanie on this journey of healing and am pleased to give the book an A. 

Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy via NetGalley.  

The Words Between Us: My Review

The Words Between Us

About the Book:

Robin Windsor has spent most of her life under an assumed name, running from her family's ignominious past. She thought she'd finally found sanctuary in her rather unremarkable used bookstore just up the street from the marina in River City, Michigan. But the store is struggling and the past is hot on her heels.

When she receives an eerily familiar book in the mail on the morning of her father's scheduled execution, Robin is thrown back to the long-lost summer she met Peter Flynt, the perfect boy who ruined everything. That book--a first edition Catcher in the Rye--is soon followed by the other books she shared with Peter nearly twenty years ago, with one arriving in the mail each day. But why would Peter be making contact after all these years? And why does she have a sinking feeling that she's about to be exposed all over again?

With evocative prose that recalls the classic novels we love, Erin Bartels pens a story that shows that words--the ones we say, the ones we read, and the ones we write--have more power than we imagine.

My Comments:

The cover is what drew this bookworm to this book.  As noted above, books were an important part of Robin and Peter's relationship back in high school and they are the way he brings himself back into her life today.  Back in high school Peter used to give her books that had belonged to his mother, an English teacher who had died recently.  The books had is mother's highlights and notes; all were sad an all included women whose lives were unhappy.  To "pay" for the book, Robin would write poems for Peter.  

When Robin left town suddenly, she returned the books to Peter, leaving them on his doorstep.  Now he is sending them back, one at a time, and inside the books, he wrote her poems.  Why?  

Besides the Robin/Peter plotline there is the question of what happened all those years ago that landed her parents in jail.  Her dad is supposed to be executed but receives a last-minute stay.  

Erin Bartels' writing is lyrical, the prose is practically poetry.  The descriptions are lush without being overdone.  It is one of those books where I can read a paragraph out loud just to hear the beauty of the words.  That's the good.  

Robin runs a used book store and during the course of the book is engaged in building a dinosaur out of used books.  She also daily gives her parrot an old book to tear up.  She notes that there are some books that stand the test of time; their characters become part of reader and the reader's life whereas in other books, like those used for the parrot or the dinosaur, readers don't remember them after they have read them. For all the beauty in the writing of this book, it falls squarely in the second category.  Basically, none of it rings true.  Knowing what I know about law (and which I'll admit most people do not), the story of her parents has too many holes in it.  Robin's finds that convince her to leave town seem improbable at best.  What she does when she leaves town?  Nope, doesn't sound real either.  How the problem of her parents gets solved? Farfetced to say the least.  

The book is published by Revell, which is a Christian imprint, but two thirds of the way through the book I had no idea why it was considered "Christian".  Robin's grandmother went to church but about all that was said about it was that Robin refused to go.  In the last third of the book Robin meets a minor character at church and we hear the sermon, and later get some advice from the minister's wife, but I didn't find faith to be a major factor in the book and if it otherwise appeals to you, I wouldn't let a dislike of faith-based literature dissuade you from reading this. 

I got the book from my library via Hoopla.  It is available at no addtional cost if you are a Kindle Unlimited member.