All We Know of Love (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: All We Know of Love Karen Coats Baskin, Norar Aleigh All We Know of Love. Candlewick, 2008 201p ISBN 978-0-7636-3623-4 $16.99 Ad Gr. 7–10 More than four years after Natalie’s mother walked out on her and her father, a birthday gift arrives with a return address, alerting Natalie to her mother’s whereabouts. [End Page 149] Telling her father that she is spending her vacation with her best friend’s family on a ski vacation, Natalie buys a bus ticket and heads from Connecticut to Florida. The rest of the narrative is composed of Natalie’s anxiety and memories, cut through with the love stories—some revelatory, some heartbreaking, some ordinary—of the folks she meets along the way, until she finds her mother and gets some, if not all, of her questions answered. The metaphor of a bus trip to indicate a maturation process is nothing new, and this story certainly suffers from overworked clichés—the large, compassionate black woman with a memory of love that sustains her, the tired waitress who got pregnant too soon, the soft-spoken gay man with the secret crush that broke his heart. Their stories interrupt Natalie’s own sorting of her experiences with love until now; there is no indication that her companions actually shared these stories aloud with Natalie, and the first intrusion is abrupt until the reader figures out that the introspective narrator has been switched out for a new one. Still, Natalie’s navel-gazing is wise, lyrical, and familiar to the point of affirmation; readers will find their own experiences and emotions mirrored and amplified here to a gratifying degree. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois