I Loved You All: A Novel

Paula Sharp's tale of a family on the edge takes place in upstate New York in the late '70s, in a gloomy prison town of harsh winters and hard-core Christians. Marguerite Daigle loves to drink; she also loves her daughters, Mahalia and Penny, but she cannot seem to pull herself away from the bottle long enough to raise them. So they go to school in dirty clothes, drink Coca-Cola for dinner, and sit on the steps waiting for mom to return from her benders. The youngest daughter, 8-year-old Penny, narrates I Loved You All. She's a rebel who's constantly in trouble at school; she draws mean cartoons of teachers. Penny remembers her mother's confidences, and forgives her in retrospect:

Years after that summer, my mother told us that she had awakened one morning when she was thirty-seven and found she needed a little whisky to start the day. She understood that she had undergone a kind of change of life overnight, slid into a new personal chemistry that required alcohol the way a car needs gasoline to run. The feeling, she said, was as definite as knowing you were gravely ill, or that you were pregnant.

At 15, the oldest daughter, Mahalia, is not so forgiving, and much of I Loved You All concerns her joining an extreme right-to-life church, passing out pamphlets, and crying for the unborn children in abortion clinics. The book's title comes from Gwendolyn Brooks's remarkable poem "the mother," which begins: "Abortions will not let you forget. / You remember the children you got that you did not get." Sharp is interested in the ways people succumb: to sex and addiction, to ideas of God. The eccentric, neglectful mother of I Loved You All will be familiar to readers of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping or Jenny Offill's Last Things. Like those writers, Sharp is interested in the ways kids come of age in troubled families--the ways they try to escape, and the ways they try to forgive. --Ellen Williams