Customer Reviews

A Theory Of All Things

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Our bookclub read Peggy's book last month and we all LOVED it ! We honestly ,truly did and it doesn't even count that Peggy is one of our members! We would love it anyway and may I say we are a very discerning group of readers,educators,professional women who know what we like! Not only that but we know Oprah would love it too and we think she really needs to come to Cooperstown,NY and put us on her show . Oh,yes,Peggy too as there would be no book at all without her !

One of the things we like to do at our meetings is try to pretend the book is being made into a screenplay and we pick the actors we think would fit the roles. We had a grand time doing so with A Theory Of All Things because Peggy could tell us how close or far off the mark we were. We also had so much fun deciding who in our group were "Marys" and who were not . Wish you all could have been there . Susan Miosek ,Cooperstown,NY (where we have much more than Baseball !)

This was a wonderfully drawn story of family dysfunction...poignant, humorous and wise. Having avoided all thoughts of Physics since High School I was both surprised and enlightened at my new-found understanding and enjoyment of how this science relates to life. Give this book to everyone on your gift list!

This is the second of five bound galleys that I've received from the Permanent Press. The first, the Chester Chronicles, was great. Peggy Leon's A Theory of All Things may even be better. And honestly, I'm not just saying that, and I don't feel under any obligation to love all these books. But I really do love this book!

A Theory of All Things opens with emails to and from Mark, a young man who evidently committed some dire faux pas at a university function. I think I may have met him many years ago, at college, studying math. He was the one that could wax eloquent about string theory but would struggle to understand why it's not important to calculate minimal lengths for tying parcels together. He was the seriously cute one, genius in the making but not quite capable of living in this world of lesser beings. The author portrays Mark so convincingly that his mishaps evoke astonished laughter, his misunderstandings induce cringes of embarrassment, and his ham-handed attempts to compliment his girlfriend leave readers in despair.

But Mark has a family and a theory; several theories in fact, though he hopes one day to combine them. One theory in particular concerns the singularity of disaster. Can the past, before the world fell apart, actually be considered irrelevant to the present that grows out of its chaos? But who will it hurt to have their feelings and their memories so discounted?

Mark's family and friends each have their say in this book. The writer sister who stays at home, center of the family, guardian of a father who's falling apart from Alzheimers; the photographer composing images, real and imagined, into story; the artist digging beneath while missing what might be lying on the surface; and the wandering brother, Luke, who seems to have searched for home ever since he was six.

A disaster blew this family apart, but, like all disasters, it eventually proves to have been built on many things that came before. Characters create their own histories, and even the mathematician proves infinitely creative in his observations of entropy. But it isn't true that everything's winding down--not even the father whose broken memories evoke the phantom world of their lost childhoods. And strangers walking into their lives see and build on the foundations of the past.

Like a universe, expanding and contracting, the family is brought back together by circumstance. Love changes them. Memory feeds them. Risk brings them out of themselves. And Mark's last grasp for truth doesn't destroy it after all, but ends in a wonderful rebuilding and quiet revelation.

A Theory of All Things is a beautifully hopeful, vividly real and creative novel, built on fascinating characters, tragic situations, bright humor and solidly patient reality. Like one of Luke's wind-chimes, so intriguingly described that the reader sees and hears them in the written word, the trials of life are turned into something startlingly wonderful, reflecting more than sunlight, elevating life, and mathematics, into art.

Peggy Leon's second novel is an original story, with an interesting cast of characters - all with different personalities and voices - yet all molded of the same stuff. Her story is way more than interesting, and kept me turning pages.

The story revolves around the six Bennett children, their father who suffers from Alzheimer's, a mother who disappeared years before, and two young women in relationships with two of the sons. The story is told in diary form, with snippets of e-mails sprinkled in between.

Peter, the oldest, committed suicide sometime after the mother abandoned the family. Sarah, a photographer, and her twin sister, Ellie, a sculptor, live in New York and on an Aegean Island, respectively. Mary has stayed at home to care for Frank, their father, and even though she has an advanced degree in English Literature, she has never worked outside the home. She is also the anchor that holds the family together. Luke is the youngest, and he is a loner, who wanders the roads around Southern California and collects discarded soda and beer cans which he fashions into mobiles. Luke also collects Willow, a young woman with story-telling tattoos and piercings galore.

The sixth sibling - and the most interesting -- is Mark. He has a PhD in physics, and never misses an opportunity to apply scientific principles to every aspect of life. Somewhat dorky and relationship challenged, he is dating Clare, a graduate student where he teachers.

With amazing skill, Leon has created unique voices for all these characters. I hope this novel makes it to the big screen, because the humor, the mild pathos, the tension all work together so well with these characters, I can see them and hear their voices as I read. This book is now available, and you want to get on the Peggy Leon bandwagon now! 5 stars

--Chiron, 3/10/10

**Originally reviewed for [...]**

A Theory of All Things by Peggy Leon can only be described as interesting. The novel is filled with quirkiness, knowledge, characters both charming and alienating, and situations that are so hard to believe, yet so very relatable. Needless to say, the book is very complex and contains many layers, yet never loses the reader in too many images or too much dialogue.

Leon tells the story of a group of siblings: Mary, Mark, Ellie, Sara, and Luke who are all affected profoundly and differently by the abandonment of their mother and the suicide of their brother Peter. All the siblings are very unusual and all very connected both by blood and the cosmos in spite of their differences. Mary is the surrogate mother who never left home and the primary caregiver of their father, Frank, who suffers from Alzheimer's. Mark is a physicist, a blunt and often clueless genius who massively lacks people and conversation skills. Ellie and Sara are twins and artists, one in Greece, the other in New York each with their own new discoveries that they have to sort through. Luke is also an artist and wanders, little is said about Luke. When family circumstances arise, the siblings all come together in their childhood home. Much of the story is told through the email correspondence between everyone and the novel progresses in chapters divided by everyone's respective point of view. I love when authors do this; I think it adds a level of dimension to scenes and characters that lacks if only told through one person's eyes.

The start of the book is slow and seems to loop endlessly. Mark and Sara are the hardest characters to sympathize with and the constant use of scientific terms and theories in Mark's chapters make his early sections difficult to troll through. His character is redeemed and shown in a new light as the novel ends, but I never really liked or got into Sara. Luke, Mary, and Ellie are fun to follow throughout. When Luke's girlfriend Willow joins the family A Theory of All Things really warms up. Peggy Leon does an excellent job of keeping the characters separate and entwined at the same time, they are individuals with very different tastes and lives, that is never forgotten or ignored yet above all else they are, and remain family. After the slow start, Peggy Leon was really able to captivate me as the story unfolded and I found myself pushing through quickly in order to see where the next person would lead the novel. A Theory of All Things, is a thoughtful and provoking book, one that shows that family trumps all else in the grand scheme of everything.