All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

by Janelle Brown

Ebook, 2008

Status

Available

Call number

813.6

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Random House (2008), 450 pages

Description

A smart, comic listen about a Silicon Valley family in free fall over the course of one eventful summer. When Paul Miller's pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife Janice is sure this is the windfall she's been waiting years for--until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune. Meanwhile, four hundred miles south in Los Angeles, the Millers' older daughter Margaret has been dumped by her newly famous actor boyfriend and left in the lurch by an investor who promised to revive her fledgling post-feminist magazine, Snatch. Sliding toward bankruptcy and dogged by creditors, she flees for home where her younger sister Lizzie, 14, is struggling with problems of her own. Formerly chubby, Lizzie has been enjoying her newfound popularity until some bathroom graffiti alerts her to the fact that she's become the school slut. The three Miller women retreat behind the walls of their Georgian colonial to wage battle with divorce lawyers, debt collectors, drug-dealing pool boys, mean girls, country club ladies, evangelical neighbors, their own demons, and each other. In the process they become achingly sympathetic characters we can't help but root for, even as the world they live in epitomizes everything wrong with the American Dream.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member sonam_soni

Set in Silicon Valley with IPO's, Drugs, Family issues, etc. I had read a review on this in the newspaper and it was engaging enough for me to finish it but somewhat formulaic.

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LibraryThing member sonyau

Entertaining book that melds the socio-comic with a critique on our money-driven, sex-obsessed culture. The characters end up likable. However, three's the best I can do for a novel I enjoyed but would never re-read. Fits right in with the slew of books deconstructing the upper-middle and/or

academic class including writers like Meghan Daum and Claire Messud. This novel won't stick with me long, but held my interest for the six or so hours it took to read. Might be interesting for a book club that's not uptight talking about sex, drugs, and the veneer that holds together an upper-middle class suburbia.

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LibraryThing member ImBookingIt

In spite of all of the terrible things that happened in this book, I really enjoyed reading it (or in this case, listening to it). The characters in a book are important to me. The three women rang true, and I identified in some way with each of them: Janice (the mother), unable to face unpleasant

truth and doing anything to avoid it, even within herself; Margaret, the smart older sister, for whom failure is not an option; and Lizzie, feeling lost and on the wrong path in her high school years. I also liked the interplay (or lack thereof) between the characters.The book grabbed me on a personal basis, from being a child in a family that divorced (with some real parallels to the story), to having seen the excitement of startups and the IPO process-- as a spouse.In my book club, we talked about the likelihood of all of these things happening to a family at once. Since the events (or their root causes) are interrelated, it isn't as unlikely as it first seems, but the book is larger than life.This book left me with a lot to think about. I also am a little unsettled by the feeling there is more to explore about this book. We had a good discussion at my book club meeting, making it to our benchmark hour of book talk before our hour of personal chat. I did get some additional insight in that time. I just feel that we could have talked longer-- if only someone had the right questions to ask.

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LibraryThing member LaBibliophille

Ok book. Not much to say about it-full of cliches. It was good to read in an airport waiting for a plane.

LibraryThing member gmmoney

A rollicking summer read detailing the divorce of a Silicon Valley house wife and the fallout for her and her fragile daughters, all of whom share the same desperate need for love and attention. It was a little predictable toward the end, but it was well written and had a couple of twists and turns

that kept me turning the pages. Great beach read.

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LibraryThing member cottongirl7

Talk about everything spiraling down the drain. This page turner of a book takes the reader to a world of rich tastes and gossip in the land of fake friends and large amounts of weatlh. Following the story through three women with vastly different outlooks and life experiencees, the reader comes

face to face with; marriage, divorce, debt, wealth, love, drugs, sex, strange family dinamics, and discovering what your made of. I think we all can relate with something each of main characters go through, from being flat broke, wanting to be liked, or being betrayed by those we trusted.

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LibraryThing member LisMB

Enjoyable book. I would recommend. Easy to make connections with characters and to become immersed into their stories.

LibraryThing member coolmama

A really interesting debut novel.

At first, I could not tell if it was a comedy - as it really wasn't funny, but it sort of didn't know what it wanted to be. It got better as it went on.

Janice's husbands company just made a fortune.

And then: he divorces her, she becomes a drug addict, her eldest

daughter is in debt, on and on and on. Not a downer of a book, but it captured the interfamily dynamics and problems well.

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LibraryThing member nyiper

I'm not sure what I expected but once I'm "into"a book I have a hard time not finishing it. The actual writing was good---you really could mentally visualize everything Brown described and you could feel the emotional upheaval of each of the family members. But it was almost too much soap opera

after a while. I finished it to "find out what happened," but I never found myself even mildly enthusiastic about any of the characters.

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LibraryThing member lindap69

better than average summer escape novel

LibraryThing member Raven9167

All right, I'm not going to rate this because I could not finish it, but I think I should say why I could not finish it. I really tried with this book...I can't remember the last book I completely abandoned. But this book was just too depressing for me to get through. I don't know if it was that I

was listening to the book rather than reading it or what, but I just couldn't do it. The terrible things that happen to these three characters was just too much for me. I kept trying to hang with it, thinking that EVENTUALLY relief had to come, but it just didn't come quick enough. Will I try this again some day? Perhaps. But for now I had to put it down.

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LibraryThing member mtchrista

Just not my cup of tea.

One thing that kept popping into my head while reading "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything" was that prior to reading it I remembered it being referred to as a great beach book or great summer read. To me that usually brings to mind a light heart feel good storyline or if

there are serious issues there are great characters that you feel an emotional investment in and are rooting for. Author, Janelle Brown, offers characters I found it hard to relate to or care for. Janice is the mother of 29 year old daughter Margaret an 14 year old Lizzie who all have a bomb dropped on them by Janice's husband of 29 years. While there aren't deep parental/child bonds this would've been the perfect opportunity for these 3 women to unite and help each other through this crisis and form those bonds. But that's not the case, instead they focus on separate issues of their own without turning to each other. They are plagued with issues and I mean plagued: infidelity, divorce, drug use, alcohol abuse,promiscuity, teen pregnancy, body image issues, financial woes that lead to bankruptcy and the list goes on. Which for many I'm sure would find full of intrigue, for me personally this isn't the type of themes that I can sit back and enjoy unless it were a united front getting through it. Yes, it gave real world issues but for me it left me frustrated how things were dealt with and yet at the end seemingly happily falls into place. By no means do I think it was a bad book just not the type I choose to escape the real world.

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LibraryThing member JoeYee

The book is about three women in a family during the parents' divorce. I like how different the struggles they are through among the age group: house wife, career starter and a teen. When I was reading the Lizzie's story, I thought I was reading a young adult book. It is like two books in one.

=)

Received a free copy from Goodreads First Reads in exchange for an honest review.

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LibraryThing member LyndaInOregon

Despite the fact that the cover blurbs promise "a razor-sharp critique of the absurd expectations" of modern affluence, this is merely a story of three women who each loses something of value and has to figure out whether it was really worth all that much to begin with.

Janice loses her husband of

29 years and her title of World's Perfect Silicon Valley Wife, and then is threatened with being denied half her soon-to-be ex's windfall IPO profits.

Eldest daughter Margaret loses her boyfriend and the magazine she has struggled to start goes down the tubes when an anticipated merger falls through.

And 14-year-old Lizzie loses a ton of weight, her virginity, and her reputation.

After setting this triple-play into motion, Brown slows down the pace until the last 50 pages or se drag on interminably. If you've already invested your time up to this point, you might as well hang on for the final denouemont, but you probably ought to pack a lunch. It's a long haul.

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LibraryThing member AngelaLam

A literary masterpiece...

This riveting story started out like a modern Virginia Woolf novel and escalated into the collapse of a nuclear family upon the cusp of attaining the American Dream.

As things went from bad to worse for the Miller family, I wanted to put the book down but couldn't. I now

understand why people slow down to watch the wreckage of an automobile accident on the side of the road. That's what this novel was like for me.

A must read for anyone interested in modern literary novels.

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LibraryThing member cherybear

The trials and tribulations of Janice and her two daughters, Lizzie and Margaret.
They all have SO many problems and don't know how to talk to each other about them.

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