All Souls [Hardcover]

Christine Schutt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2008

In 1997, at the distinguished Siddons School on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the school year opens with distressing news: Astra Dell is suffering from a rare disease. Astra's friends try to reconcile the sick girl's suffering with their own fierce longings and impetuous attachments. Car writes unsparing letters, which the dirty Marlene, in her devotion, then steals. Other classmates carry on: The silly team of Suki and Alex pursue Will Bliss while the subversive Lisa Van de Ven makes dates with Miss Wilkes. The world of private schools and privilege in New York City is funny, poignant, cruel, and at its heart is a sick girl, Astra Dell, "that pale girl from the senior class, the dancer with all the hair, the red hair, knotted or braided or let to fall to her waist, a fever and she consumed."

National Book Award Finalist Christine Schutt has created a wickedly original tale of innocence, daring and illness.

(20071201)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The brutal, materialistic and dysfunctional underbelly of prep schools and the females who live in it create the foundation for Schutt's beautifully written but light-on-substance novel (following 2004's National Book Award finalist Florida). In the midst of 1997 Manhattan, all-girl prep school Siddons churns out ladies with a wide spectrum of academic skills, mental problems and severe insecurities, all of whom have been touched in some way by the novel's saintly lynchpin, Astra Dell, who leaves her studies behind to fight her rare cancer. Schutt introduces a large cast of characters who are dealing with Astra's absence and their own personal problems: Astra's best friend, anorexic Car; dirty girl Marlene; the inseparable and insensitive Alex and Suki; lesbian outcast Lisa; and their beloved instructors, the awkward Anna Mazur and Tim Weeks, the handsome colleague Anna's in love with. Unfortunately, Schutt shoehorns too many characters into a relatively thin book, and though there isn't a boring sentence in here, Schutt doesn't do enough with the familiar prep school setting to make the story resonate. (Apr.)
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School—Set in a girls' school on Manhattan's Upper East Side, this book is a wonderfully written, touching story. Popular Astra Dell spends much of her senior year in the hospital with a rare form of tissue cancer. A young teacher visits Astra and considers her own brother who died young, while doubting her role as teacher and her potential relationship with a colleague who loves being unattached almost as much as he enjoys the students' crushes on him. Astra's friend Car is too busy with a multitude of issues to visit, but sends angst-filled letters that are sometimes stolen by Marlene, the unpopular girl who visits every day and considers Astra her new best friend. Astra's widowed father finds it hard to speak with his own daughter. Like E. R. Frank's Life Is Funny (Puffin, 2002), All Souls is written from the perspectives of several characters. Schutt, who herself teaches at a New York girls' school, mines those hallways for an extraordinarily captivating take on the teachers', parents', and teens' troubled worlds. At times she evokes Virginia Woolf's style in the immediacy of her characters' thoughts. All Souls may at first remind teens of formulaic novels such as Cecily von Ziegesar's "Gossip Girl" series (Little, Brown), but they will quickly discover a style and depth to the writing that is refreshing for this genre.—Jennifer Waters, Red Deer Public Library, Alberta, Canada
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (April 14, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151014493
• ISBN-13: 978-0151014491
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,213,409 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?" "A DU PONT.", May 5, 2008

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All Souls (Hardcover)

There aren't any descriptions of tranquil happy school years, those "good old golden rule days" are prehistoric in Christine Schutt's spot on story of the students, parents, and teachers at Manhattan's Siddons School for Girls. A New York prep school teacher herself Schutt well knows of what she writes, and she does so with always delicate, sometimes sparse yet revelatory prose. Characters are displayed to a farthing in snippets of conversation or thoughts.

At the center of the story is Astra Dell, a senior class girl who is suffering from a rare form of cancer. She is that "pale girl...the dancer with all the hair, the red hair, knotted or braided or let to fall to her waist, a fever, and she consumed."
Her father is scarcely able to cope with his beloved daughter's illness. He longs for Grace, his late wife who was killed in an auto accident. Despite Astra's suffering, knowing his sorrow, it is she who tries to console him.

Carlotta Forestal, known as Car, is Astra's best friend. Car has an eating problem, devoting the tense meals shared with her mother to simply pushing and mashing the food on her plate. She has a retreat - her father's apartment to which she has a key. She would go there simply to wander about and phone. It is there that she can light a cigarette and "ash it on the table." Mr. Forestal had an unlisted number and her mother didn't know it, so she was safe. Car thinks of Astra and writes frequent notes to her, which are added to the surfeit of good wishes, balloons and flowers that decorate her hospital room.

Another who often thinks of Astra is Marlene Kovak who visits her often, and pens lengthy letters to her. These missiles are sometimes single spaced and three pages long. Marlene will sit in a corner of the school lounge, listening, taking notes, all to be relayed to Astra. A misfit among the daughters of wealth Marlene is an enigma. She attends Siddons solely because her mother, Theta, borrowed money to keep her there. Theta works in a dentist's office to maintain their modest home and make payments on her debt. Theta is as out of place among the mothers as Marlene is among the students, most of whom are economically privileged and emotionally deprived.

Some other soon to graduate students are Alex and Suki, best friends, who yearn to be party girls and whose college acceptance is assured thanks to family wealth. Although in a group they often engage in sub rosa conversations. As obsessed as they are with their own futures they, too, are affected by Astra's illness, remembering that she came back to school the day after her mother's funeral and agreeing, "She's perfect."

Add to this mix the teachers, specifically Anna Mazur who had come to New York from Michigan seeking "sophistication and experience." She found neither, is attracted to Tim Weeks, the most popular teacher at Siddons, and continuously confuses the names of two black girls. When asked, "Do we all look alike, Miss Mazur?" The thought is "The problem was the girls did look alike."

Another faculty member is Dr. Meltzer, "a fat man who smelled like the movies." After a mishap in class, he screams at a girl, "Who do you think you are?" The reply is "A Du Pont."

This is the world Schutt invites us to enter, and it is a fascinating one peopled with finely wrought characters and quite memorable.

- Gail Cooke

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "People make the most impact on the lives of others by being absent.", March 22, 2008

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: All Souls (Hardcover)

Schutt is a master of the incidental, those small moments, some brittle, some brilliant, revealing the human psyche in all its flaws; the briefest glimpse of what we conceal from others, is here exposed. The author brings a fresh, incisive perspective to this novel, in this case the rarified environment of the Siddons School in Manhattan's Upper East Side. To be sure, these students are privileged, their world barely marred by the harsh reality that plagues the less well off. Their sensibilities honed on the classics, diverse languages and the experiences of world travel, these senior girls grapple with which colleges to attend and the angst of bidding farewell to the sheltered years of their expensive education. Through the mysterious illness (an obscure cancer?) that has struck one of the most popular students, Astra Dell, a particular poignancy imbues the novel. The elegant Astra, with her sheaf of glowing red hair, is a symbol of Siddons perfection, struck down by the cruel blow of an indifferent fate.

Astra's slow fall into devastating illness is solemnly monitored by Mr. Dell, his wife lost to a freak accident before Astra's illness; he longs for his wife's certitude and comfort in this grueling time, as he watches his daughter's slender form evaporate under the attack of the disease that can only be fought by extreme measures. Her spare hospital room a testament to the magnitude of the battle, a table is filled with cards bearing well wishes from classmates, a gentle chorus of "get well soon" and "we miss you" crushed by the violence of harsh treatments, as painful and ominous as Astra's disease. It is the haunting voices of these others, classmates, teachers, that create the narrative beyond Astra's hospital bed. It is difficult to allocate emotion to Astra's suffering in lives fraught with the petty dramas of adolescence on the cusp of a new beginning.

A lonely female teacher visits with the students' favorite bachelor teacher. Over the months, Anna Mazur hopes for more, but he clings to the constraints of friendship. Marlene Kovacs, who never fit in with the other girls, is a regular visitor, compelled to return to Astra's bedside, giving in to impulsive theft, letters from Astra's best friend, Car. In a fugue state of her own, Car Forester pens truths that transcend the usual discourse that passes for encouragement, mirroring Astra's dilemma in a frail grasp of life's daily disappointments. Pregnant with the egocentric imaginations of teenaged girls who cannot forget Astra, the characters are increasingly drawn to the demands of approaching graduation. Isolated in the unique self-centeredness of Astra's friends and acquaintances, the pall of death hovers, a shadow of what the world has so far only hinted at, one girl's easy journey through privilege shattered by a random stroke of fate. In this place, truth flickers like a candle. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting, September 5, 2008

By 

Becky Sharp (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All Souls (Hardcover)

I just read about All Souls in the NYTBR this past weekend and read it this week -- it was really riveting, great writing, an intricate web of a story. The self interestedness was made really compelling. Good book.