All This Heavenly Glory [Hardcover]

Elizabeth Crane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2005

In All This Heavenly Glory, Elizabeth Crane's second collection of interconnected stories, readers are taken on an amusing, if slightly disjointed journey through the life of Charlotte Anne Byers, a spunky six-year-old who grows into a cynical, yet cautiously optimistic adult. Those who enjoyed Crane's debut, When the Messenger Is Hot, will surely recognize and appreciate her sharp-witted humor and emotional honesty, but new readers may be put off by her somewhat rambling writing style.When we first meet Charlotte Anne, she is in the middle of penning a seven-page personal ad that is actually one long sentence, complete with tons of semi-colons and a few alphabetical lists thrown in for good measure. The ad itself is quite hilarious, it begins with a physical description and ends with a hilarious tribute to Owen Wilson; however, the lack of sentence structure may begin to confuse readers after about two pages. This first story is a template for much of what follows in the next 17 vignettes--witty, heartfelt and graceful sentiments are often marred by a chaotic rendering that makes it difficult to actually follow along with the protagonist. Still, Crane makes it wrothwhile for readers who can navigate the choppy waters of her writing style. She's at her best when describing Charlotte's feelings about particular places, be it New York ("Charlotte has been trying to get out of New York for years. It's not nearly as simple as booking a one-way flight. People get drawn back. Places seem inferior."), L.A. ("there's nothing but Fat Burgers and short pink buildings and more freeways on the freeway..."), or the imaginary Midwestern town she hopes to live in during her next life ("...I sit on the stoop and smoke my one (stale) cigarette of the week from my gold vinyl cigarette case under the almost dark five o'clock sky..."). If we're lucky, perhaps next time Crane will make these stirring moments of clarity easier for us to find. --Gisele Toueg

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In All This Heavenly Glory, Elizabeth Crane's second collection of interconnected stories, readers are taken on an amusing, if slightly disjointed journey through the life of Charlotte Anne Byers, a spunky six-year-old who grows into a cynical, yet cautiously optimistic adult. Those who enjoyed Crane's debut, When the Messenger Is Hot, will surely recognize and appreciate her sharp-witted humor and emotional honesty, but new readers may be put off by her somewhat rambling writing style.

When we first meet Charlotte Anne, she is in the middle of penning a seven-page personal ad that is actually one long sentence, complete with tons of semi-colons and a few alphabetical lists thrown in for good measure. The ad itself is quite hilarious, it begins with a physical description and ends with a hilarious tribute to Owen Wilson; however, the lack of sentence structure may begin to confuse readers after about two pages. This first story is a template for much of what follows in the next 17 vignettes--witty, heartfelt and graceful sentiments are often marred by a chaotic rendering that makes it difficult to actually follow along with the protagonist.

Still, Crane makes it wrothwhile for readers who can navigate the choppy waters of her writing style. She's at her best when describing Charlotte's feelings about particular places, be it New York ("Charlotte has been trying to get out of New York for years. It's not nearly as simple as booking a one-way flight. People get drawn back. Places seem inferior."), L.A. ("there's nothing but Fat Burgers and short pink buildings and more freeways on the freeway..."), or the imaginary Midwestern town she hopes to live in during her next life ("...I sit on the stoop and smoke my one (stale) cigarette of the week from my gold vinyl cigarette case under the almost dark five o'clock sky...").

If we're lucky, perhaps next time Crane will make these stirring moments of clarity easier for us to find. --Gisele Toueg

From Booklist

Crane took our breath away with her first short story collection, When the Messenger Is Hot (2003), and she now jazzes readers anew in a sequence of linked stories about the -coming-of-age of one Charlotte Anne Byers. An inveterate list maker, thoughtful Charlotte lives defensively in New York, city of pervs, with her beautiful mother and does her best to decipher school cliques, fashion do's and don'ts, and the relative creepiness of her friends' male relatives. Crane swings back and forth in time, opening windows on Charlotte's covert intelligence, practiced toughness, and persistent hopefulness throughout her fractured girlhood and tween and teen years, during which her goal is to simply keep it together, on into uneasy adulthood, where she drinks too much, falls for the wrong guys, finally finds her calling in film, and loses her mother to cancer. A nervy, tragicomic, and piercing social observer, Crane captures the danger, poignancy, and hilarity of life in her cascading stream-of-consciousness reports from the psyche of an irresistible seeker. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (March 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316000892
• ISBN-13: 978-0316000895
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,475,495 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am: writer, wife, sister, daughter, teacher, eater of sweets, crafter, blogger, happy.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rambunctious, elbows-flailing prose, March 16, 2005

By 

C M Magee (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: All This Heavenly Glory (Hardcover)

Though Elizabeth Crane's All This Heavenly Glory is billed as a collection of stories, after just a few, I shifted into novel mode, which was easy to do, seeing as the whole collection is about one character viewed in many snapshots from the age of 6 to 40, Charlotte Anne Byers. Those who who have read Crane before will be familiar with her rambunctious, elbows-flailing prose, in which the dependent clauses become so laden that they at times break free into outlines and lists. The effect of this stylistic departure from standard convention is, miraculously, not at all gimmicky, because a) Crane manages to keep those piled up words from toppling over, and b) it is in keeping with the persona of the character that she has created to inhabit this book. Because All This Heavenly Glory, necessarily, touches upon many trials and tribulations of girlhood and womanhood, it seems likely that it will have the "chick lit" moniker attached to it at some point. So be it. But what this book really is is an unflinching character study of a complicated person. Charlotte Anne is raised on the Upper West Side, comes of age in the 1970s in a family branched by divorce and remarriage, and endures a decade of being lost in her 20's - both geographically and spiritually. She is both foolish and clever, endearing and infuriating, hopelessly falling apart and really good at "having it together." Not all at the same time, of course. Crane tells Byers' story episodically, filled with details and discursions, and though the book threatens to come apart under the pressure of Crane's furiously frantic stylings, she manages to pull together an overarching narrative that is telling and poignant, less - and therefore more meaningful - than the sum of its frenetic parts.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very enlightening and insightful!, January 6, 2006

By 

CoffeeGurl - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: All This Heavenly Glory (Hardcover)

I enjoyed reading Crane's When the Messenger Is Hot and had looked forward to reading another one of her short-story collections. All this Heavenly Glory is somewhat different from When the Messenger Is Hot. This is a collection of connected stories that center on a female character and what she becomes from being a spunky young girl to being quite a cynical adult. The stories are more vignettes based on the one heroine than anything else, but they make great stand-alone tales of their own. This sort of reminds me of Melissa Banks's The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, only that Crane's style is far more insightful and enlightening than the stuff Banks wrote in her collection. Anyway, my favorite vignettes here are "Howard the Filmmaker," "Notre Monde," "Brooklyn," "Guidelines," and "Football." Even though I agree with the reviewers who consider this book to be "chick-lit," I feel this collection has more depth and spunk than many of the flimsy, superficial stories found in the aforementioned books. I love chick-lit, but there are so many out there that you can no longer find the special ones from the run-of-the-mills. All this Heavenly Glory, however, is definitely one special find and I cannot recommend this book enough. I take away one star because I admit I had expected a collection of stand-alone stories and was somewhat disappointed when I discovered that it was not one. However, the book itself is great.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A unique and memorable collection of short stories, April 27, 2005

By 

Bookreporter (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: All This Heavenly Glory (Hardcover)

Reading the eighteen stories that make up this delightful novel is a little like going through a frenetic friend's box of family photos. The pictures are not in order and each one triggers another trip down memory lane, with many detours and evoking buried emotions. These include tales of her wanderlust that draws her back and forth across the country as she tries to find her place, her failed attempts to "win an Oscar in any category," the fickle and faithful friendships, and her many encounters with men, including the pervert porn producer and the forty-something rock star with "issues."

Author Elizabeth Crane, as she notes about one of her characters, "has a keen sense of observation with regard to human nature." In addition, she has a way with words that keeps the reader engaged as she relates stories in the life of Charlotte Anne Byers from age six to age forty. The child's vignettes begin when the precocious little bundle of energy is eight years old, riding the bus alone in New York City to perform in the children's chorus of the New York Opera. Even at her prepubescent age, Charlotte's mind is occupied by thoughts of love for Dante DiMedici, an older man of fifteen who is still "gender uncertain." Later she develops stage fright that pretty much ends her operatic career, but her misadventures with men go on and on.

The adult Charlotte's stories begin with her writing a lengthy personal ad...about seven pages long. In it she recalls a "brief but compellingly unfortunate prior experience in which one respondent who described himself as a handsome and well-dressed forty-year-old in fact could only be compared to Deputy Dog, if D. Dog had a comb-over and wore a soiled t-shirt with pleated pants and was closer to sixty and not a cartoon."

One of many memorable chapters is where Charlotte outlines the things that she loves about her mom, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Mom was not your typical cookie baker but "once she reupholstered Charlotte's queen-size sleeper sofa with white fabric even though it's so impractical and she never threw anything away that Charlotte might possibly have wanted or needed." But I think my favorite was the last chapter, which contains every happy-ending cliché you can think of and then some --- a must for us diehard romantics.

At times Crane's prose will seem poignant, at others pointless, depending on your perspective at the moment, and her lengthy, mind-numbing sentences can cause your eyes to glaze over if you don't stay alert. But this series of short stories written in her unique, breathless style is sure to have you nodding and smiling throughout.

--- Reviewed by Maggie Harding, a substance abuse counselor in Phoenix, AZ who wanted to be Brenda Starr before life intervened. She reviews for www.faithfulreader.com and www.womenonwriting.com. To contact Maggie, e-mail [e-mail].