Customer Reviews

I Loved You All: A Novel

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As someone who reads in excess of 80 books a year, I encounter a lot of bad novels. Even in books that are otherwise enjoyable, there are usually a few badly worded phrases or character anomalies that stop me cold. Paula Sharp's new novel "I Loved You All" has none of those errors. It is FLAWLESS. Step into the mind of Sharp's narrator Penny and I defy you to want to leave. Penny is sharp, quick-witted and observant in the tradition of Scout Finch. Her mother, Marguerite, a widow, is spiraling down into alcohol addiction. Penny has an older sister, Mahalia,who becomes friends with the a fervently religious neighbor named Isabel Flood. The neighbor disdains everything from the use of the word 'Jeez' to television and Penny loathes her. But, in Isabel Flood, Mahalia finds the mother she so sorely missed with Marguerite. When Marguerite is forced into residential treatment for her alcoholism, the children are sent to live with Isabel with terrible results for Penny. Reviewers are classifying this as an abortion book, which is a shame. With the exception of a few mentions early on, abortion rarely even enters the book until more than halfway through. It is first and foremost the story of a family, the most lovable family, incidentally, in modern fiction, set against the backdrop (yes) of the abortion debate in the late seventies. Paula Sharp definitely owes something to Harper Lee in her sharp characterizations of spirited Southern tomboys (no matter where they live at the moment) and the way that family loyalties are affected by political issues. The characters are true, the plot flows smoothly (albeit too quickly--this is a book you don't want to end) and the "moral" (such as it is) is there, without overstepping the bounds into preachiness. Whatever your beliefs about abortion, this is a book not to be missed. It is smart, kind and above all, loving in its handling of every type of person and problem. Thoroughly enjoyable, Paula Sharp gives the best of what popular fiction has to offer and a book that anyone who loved "To Kill A Mockingbird" should not miss.

This is the first book I've read in a while that I longed to return to whenever I had to stop reading. Where to begin? First of all, the characters are great -- you wish you knew all of them personally. Secondly, the book is gripping -- it pulls you along with its comedy and drama and suspense. Third, I realized as I read this novel how rare it is nowadays to find a literary novel that tackles an important, controversial political topic like abortion politics. What a brave thing for a writer to do! Clearly, it would be impossible to write about this subject and please everybody, but I suspect that a very broad spectrum of people could enjoy this book. The treatment of the right-to-life debate in this book is brilliant, funny and balanced. I suspect only the most close-minded people could be offended by this book's handling of the underlying political controversies. Although I'd guess the writer is pro-choice, her portrayal of the main, right-to-life character, Isabel Flood, is affectionate and endearing, and insightful. She lets every character have his or her say on the issue, whether it's an evangelical minister or a muckraking journalist, and she shows believably that every character's political choices are motivated and driven by their own personality quirks. Perhaps that's the best thing about this book -- that even though it centers around a difficult issue, the issue is always secondary to the characters, who will stay with you for a long time. They include, among others, the anti-social but kind right-to-lifer Isabel Flood, the open-hearted and vivacious Marguerite Daigle and her parole officer boyfriend, the hyperactive troublemaking eight-year-old Penny and her rebellious older sister, and their hilarious uncle F.X., an unemployed journalist who loves provoking Isabel, and who brightens the page whenever he walks on. When I put this book down, what struck me most of all is that this book is completely original -- no one writes like Paula Sharp.

I loved Paula Sharp's Crows over a Wheatfield -- it was so gripping, and so fearless in the way it delved into a controversial topic, and it had the kind of characters you're sorry to say good-bye to at the end of a novel. I Loved You All has those same qualities, but it's a completely different kind of book. While Crows over a Wheatfield was mostly serious (about domestic violence), this new novel is more like Sharp's earlier works, The Woman Who Was Not All There and Lost in Jersey City. It's laugh-out-loud funny, even though it's about a pretty heavy subject -- abortion politics.

I think Paula Sharp's ability to build characters is phenomenal -- when I read this book, sometimes I felt like the characters were more real than me! To begin with, there's Marguerite Daigle, a hard-drinking single parent transplanted from Louisiana to a bleak town in New York where everyone is apparently employed by the local prison or in it. There's her parole officer boyfriend who entertains her children by telling them stories about criminals. There's Marguerite's 8-year-old daughter Penny, a free spirit who knows no bounds -- who, for example, injures herself by riding a bicycle along the top of an eight-foot wall, and whose teacher tells her she's missing the piece people call a "conscience." Penny's 15-year-old sister is furious at her mother and so walks right into the arms of -- who else? A flaming, fanatical right-to-lifer with an agenda of her own. And of all the characters, the right-to-lifer Isabel Flood is the best. She's vivid and well-rounded and entertaining. Even if your politics diverge from hers, you admire her for her energy and uniqueness, and come to accept her on her own terms.

Even though this is a very funny book, I found it also made me think a little more deeply about right-to-life politics. The novel shows what happens when someone who is fundamentally religious finds her religious beliefs compromised by people within her own movement who have a political agenda that is clearly not godly. The novel also shows how someone who is not a violent right-to-lifer might be led to violence inadvertently by associating herself with the wrong people.

There are very few literary writers in America today who tackle these hard political subjects. We're lucky to have a writer like Paula Sharp doing it. This novel is great! I Loved You All is also a perfect Reading Group novel, both because it's beautifully written and because the way it handles the controversial topic of abortion is fresh and interesting.

This book is pure story, from cover to cover. I just fell in love with Penny Daigle, the child star of this book. She is precocious, hard to handle, mischievous, and an overall delight to know. I admired her courage and her devilish ways. Each character is brought to light simply, yet revealed in intimate detail. There is Isabel, who I can picture in my mind as clear as day from the descriptions in the book. She is our resident religious fanatic intent upon forcing her views on the world and changing reality. Mahalia is a struggling teen, Penny's older sister, who acts as though she is just that, a struggling teen, vacuumed up by Isabel and unsure of her place in the world. F.X. is a fabulous uncle, I wish I had one like him. The mother's struggle with alcoholism tends to take a back seat to the story, even though I think it was intended to be the focal point, yet it is Marguerite's alcoholism that really starts everything. From page to page, the story is filled with drama and delight. It's humorous and sad, fluffy and deep at the same time. This author is a true find.

I loved this book. The characters grab hold of you and don't let you go. Even though the main character, the right-to-lifer Isabel Flood, is probably not someone I'd want to know in my real life, Sharp does such a great job in portraying her and revealing Isabel's motives and thoughts that I found her surprisingly sympathetic. This is my idea of a really great novel - one that makes you see the world anew, from a perspective you never would have considered before.

It's probably worth adding that in the wake of the events of September 11, this novel prevents an enlightening view of American religious fanaticism and our own home grown forms of political violence. No one is better than Sharp at writing about the links between Americans' personal lives and their politics. This was a brave book to write, besides -- it takes a alot of courage for a novelist to plunge into the tempestuous waters of the great abortion debate.

This is a truly compelling read. I looked forward to returning to this book each time I was forced to leave it. The characters are well drawn, and there is a well-paced forward motion.

Unfortunately, there were flaws, too. In order to convey information through the young narrator, the reader was expected to believe that Penny got herself into any number of unbelievable situations. Worse for me was the fact that the author let her views on the issue of abortion overpower her characters. It is certainly Sharp's story to tell, but I wish she had done just that--told the story. The politics are there; we didn't need to be hit over the head with them.

But you won't be sorry to read it. Just don't pick this one up when you have a lot of other things to attend to. It's really hard to put down.

In the capable hands of novelist Paula Sharp, the so-called "right-to-life" movement serves as a backdrop to an extraordinary examination of the consequences of loneliness on a series of fully-realized characters. The people who live in the pages of "I Loved You All" are fully-realized individuals, each of whom struggles with the anguish of either self-imposed or social isolation. Even the setting, bleak, remote Stein, New York enhances the eccentricities and frustrations of the characters in this compelling, believable, and ultimately redemptive novel.

Told through the eyes of the endearingly hyperkinetic eight-year-old Penny Daigle, the novel gains its tension through the unspoken battle between her beleaguered but vibrant mother Marguerite and the eerily stoic Isabelle Flood, whose anti-abortion stance masks a life bereft of human connection. Penny's sister Mahalia, compelled by circumstances and personal needs, reflects and intensifies the loneliness experienced by the two women who exert the most profound influence over her life: her mother Marguerite and her caretaker/mentor/role model, Isabelle.

"I Loved You All," however, is much more about character development than a plot that pivots around the struggle over abortion rights. The four females who comprise the core of the novel's attention each face their own demons; each confronts a brutal loneliness and each develops the means to face her adversary. Marguerite, though absent much of the novel, has enormous appeal. While young, she sacrifices her adolesence so that she may care for her recently blinded brother, F.X. Denied the opportunity of romance and free time, Marguerite is rescued by a loving marriage, which ends precipitously when her husband dies and leaves Marguerite the responsibility of raising two vastly different daughters. A hell-raiser by nature, the grating endless restrictions of work, parenting and homemaking submerge Marguerite in a haze of unfulfillment. A transplanted Louisianan suffering through life in barren upstate New York, Marguerite staves off oblivion through drink.

Only the steadfast dedication of the two men who love her (her brother F.X. and her beau, David) convinces her to return to her home state to recover. In her absence, her daughters take divergent paths to alleviate their sense of abandonment and isolation. The oldest, Mahalia, obliterates her beauty and effaces her personality as she orbits more and more closely around Isabelle Flood. Paula Sharp draws an exquisite picture of a teen-ager at odds with her family and her self as she presents Mahalia selecting involvement in a dessicated and stultifying "right-to-life" church instead of the unpredictable, but liberating, prospects of adolesence. Mahalia's youngest sister, Penny, is literally hell on wheels. Her unfettered enthusiasm for life and unquenchable thirst for knowledge and adventure thinly mask a child vulnerable to her own feelings of being unmoored, adrift amidst a family which is disintegrating. For sheer, unadulterated energy and commitment to life, Penny is unparalleled; yet all her sound and fury pivot around her profound misery at being apart from her mother.

The novel's most enigmatic character, Isabelle Flood, suffers her own sequestered life. Unwanted from childhood and untouched by love, Isabelle satisfies her need for connection through a ramrod dedication to the precepts of the anti-abortion movement. Though capable of caring for Mahalia and Penny during Marguerite's absence but utterly unable to savor the messy possibilities of love, Isabelle is best seen not as a mouthpiece for a political movement, but the tragic residue of a culture which offers alienated and rejected adults little opportunity for a happy life. She is at once honorable and detestable, idealistic and repressive, caring and insensitive. Her contradictions give her a tragic believability.

In a revealing interview, Paula Sharp confesses, "I can't imagine life without stories. I think I would evaporate if I stopped writing." Her briliant and absorbing "I Loved You All" endeavors to educate its audience about the most painful aspects of life: how humans battle, often without the benefit of emotional roadmaps, to overcome loneliness. That Ms. Sharp has done so though a novel which charts the tumultuous waters of the struggle for reproductive rights is all the more remarkable.

Paula Sharp manages to keep her cast of characters larger than life, yet believable at the same time. "I Loved You All," told from the point of view of a precocious eight year old Penny, tells the story of her and her sister Mahalia's stay with anti-abortion zealot, Isabel Flood, while their mother, Louisiana native Marguerite Daigle, must dry out from a losing battle with the bottle. Penny can, in her own way, see the failings of Isabel in her efforts to rally the troops, but Mahalia becomes Isabel's most faithful disciple -- a sort of backhanded way to rebel against her fiery mother. The story may seem to be about abortion, but it is more about how religion is used by people as a controlling device, an escape valve, a way to judge people, anything but what it is supposed to be.

I Loved You All is witty, engaging and remarkable exploration of the mind of a religious fanatic involved in right-to-life politics. Isabel Flood, the novel's main character, is a woman who lives as a kind of outcast in a small town in Upstate New York. Her only way of integrating herself into human society is to worm herself into the lives of the families around her, ostensibly as a champion of the right-to-life cause. Her competing needs to cling to her rigid religious perspective, and to find companionship among people who rarely share her views, bring about results that are both hilarious and tragic. All of the characters in this book are vivid and entertaining, from the 8-year-old badly behaved girl who dogs Isabel on her religious missions to the provocative journalist F.X., who composes and sends to Isabel unsigned letters signed by "The Knights of the Unborn," an organization of fetuses who decide to protest the idea of birth. Paula Sharp is unequaled among American novelists in her ability to portray ordinary, quirky Americans caught up in the forces of modern ideological causes. This book is enjoyable from beginning to end.

Abortion. Relationships. Understanding. Addiction. Secrets. Love. Healing. Intrigued? Paula Sharps's 'I Loved You All' offers all of the above and more. She has created a novel full of unforgettable characters and story that could easily happen. The characters will make you laugh, understand, shake your head, and gasp!

I Loved You All is set against the backdrop of the 1970's Pro Life Movement while a mother is battling an addiction and desperately trying to hold on to those she loves. The novel primarily centres on the mother-daughter relationship and how easily it can de disrupted by both external and internal forces.

Paula Sharp presents a very serious and debatable subject...abortion. She does this with class and does not belabour the issue. The true focus is on the development and repair of relationships not providing a forum for the Pro Life/Pro Choice debate.

I encourage others to seek out this book and other titles by Sharp. ~Kelly