All the Little Moments by G. BensonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
*I received this book from Ylva Publishing for an honest review*
This is one of those difficult books to read. Oddly ‘unputdownable’, yet still angsty. Well, I say that because I do not normally find angst among the things I normally find with books I can’t stop reading.
In my second book by this author that I’ve read, the main and only point of view character, Anna, opens the book in a car on the way to her parents place . . . cutting short a longish vacation with her long-term girlfriend, Hayley. Cut short because her best friend – her brother Jake, and her other friend, his wife Sally, were killed in a car accident. Losing either/both immediately and permanently alters Anna’s life. Then the will is read and her life is altered even more – for the woman who never planned nor wanted children, is now the guardian to her brother’s two children – six year old Ella and 18 month old Toby. Anna is rather reluctant to take on this burden.
By the half way mark I was vaguely confused and worried, there was a bunch of angst and drama up to this point – the book is filled with it – but everything seemed ‘set’ now. Kids, support system that includes Anna, Anna’s mother (father’s still around but hiding), and Anna’s two new friends Kym and Lane (with Lane being more than just a new friend). Then Cathy, Sally’s mother, suddenly turned up. And there were like huge blinking lights foreshadowing the horrors that would be unleashed by this evil horrible women. And, sadly, I was right in my perception.
I’d a loose idea that the book was a medical fiction involving lesbians, one of whom had dark skin, and that the book was by an author I’d recently read and rather enjoyed. Beyond that I hadn’t read too closely about the book to know what I was getting myself into when I opened it up and dove in.
There’s the trauma of death, relocation, relationships collapsing, forming, new responsibilities, and all that to navigate. Since there’s just the one point of view, everyone but her is something of a side character . . . or something like that. Which I mention more because I wanted to express my admiration for how deeply and well-constructed the many different characters were in this book. From the main – Anna, to Lane (girlfriend), to Kym (new friend), to Sandra (Anna and jake’s mother), to even Toby & Ella (Jake & Sally’s kids). None of these characters, at least, were stand-ins, paper thin. They all had stories and structure to them. In the beginning there was even enough there to build up an idea of both Jake and Sally, who were never, at any point in this novel, alive to present themselves to the reader.
Others, it is true, were more ‘as needed’ type characters, but there were enough well-formed characters to fill up a book. As needed as in – Andrew, Jake and Anna’s father, had something of his character presented through the almost constant refrain of how Anna and/or others were like or not like him in certain ways (like how he dove into his study and into a bottle of whiskey after his son died – hiding his emotions), though he was more someone to work around than someone to rely upon – which was the point – in its way.
Long and short of it is that this was a rather good and interesting book. Somewhat hard to read from the lingering after effects of death (both Jake & Sally, and, in addition, Kym’s husband as well).
It was interesting to watch Anna morph from the woman who opened the book – the woman who was super career focused and dead set against children to the woman she became by the end of the book.
Well, I’ve run out of things to say, at least out of things I can squeeze out and sprinkle over the screen to reflect my thoughts. Ah, I know – I’ve reached the point where I’m talking nonsense, yeah, that’s it, so I’ll depart.
Rating: 5.25
February 7 2018
View all my reviews
