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


From Publishers Weekly
About midway through Sharp's fourth novel, the eight-year-old narrator, Penny Daigle, does a flip in the air for the "sheer perilous pleasure" of it. The same sensation is elicited in the reading of this exuberant and often hilarious story about growing up in bleak smalltown New York with a restless and loving family. It's 1977, and Penny Daigle, a girl of relentless energy and curiosity, and her uncertain and judgmental sister, 15-year-old Mahalia, must deal with their single mother Marguerite's alcoholism and eventual departure to "The Place," a home in Louisiana for recovering alcoholics. Marguerite's boyfriend, a parole officer at the big state prison in town, and her puckish brother, F.X., a reporter given to dazzling monologues, are going along with Marguerite to keep an eye on her, and so Mahalia and Penny are saddled with straitlaced, pro-life babysitter Isabel Flood. Without taking sides or descending into clich , Sharp (Crows over a Wheatfield) brilliantly navigates the political and religious waters that swirl around the pro-life movement as Isabel seeks to spread her message around town with Mahalia's zealous, and Penny's reluctant, help. On the way, Penny meets a carnival of characters, including Mrs. Fury, who places Penny before a mirror to show her who her worst enemy is, and shy Katie, who, at Penny's urging, stows away in a van headed for Albany. As the town divides over the abortion issue, the dynamics of public dispute are mirrored in the sensitive negotiations of the Daigle family when Marguerite returns to find Mahalia determined to live with Isabel, now totally convinced that abortion is a sin. The narrative moves swiftly from conflict to conflict, buoyed by Sharp's perfect timing and occasionally ecstatic prose that renders water moccasins as "black ink dropped in water" and a truck headlight as "a tilted goblet of gold liquid." (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Sharp!s novel, her fifth book (e.g., Crows Over a Wheat Field), is well worth reading; the author intertwines the themes of family love, alcoholism, abortion, betrayal, and the power of a fanatically held belief. Marguerite Daigle, a widow struggling to raise two daughters in Stein, NY, is drinking too much. When her brother and her fiancE, David, whisk her away for a drying out treatment, 16-year-old Mahalia and eight-year-old Penny are left in the care of Isabel Flood, a local babysitter who is a fanatic right-to-lifer. Penny, the narrator, later recalls the events, including the effect of abortion on the fragile families of Isabel!s church, the near-breakup of the Daigle family when Mahalia wholeheartedly attaches herself to Isabel, and the family reconciliation when Marguerite returns, cured and married to David. Meanwhile, Isabel!s fanatical protests, including the destruction of the high school library, lead to a prison sentence. All these events, as related by a hyperactive child, take on a slightly comic aspect. Although the narrator offers some comments from her adult perspective, the reader is well aware that these issues are still major concerns in our society. Recommended for all public libraries."Cheryl L. Conway, Univ. of Arkansas Lib., Fayetteville Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Craig Seligman
I loved this book, probably more than it deserves, but I can't help it--Sharp's gifts are enormous.


From Booklist
Marguerite Daigle is a single mother raising two daughters in upstate New York in the 1970s. She is also losing a battle with alcoholism, until her brother, F. X., and fiance, David, intervene and take her to Louisiana for treatment. Her daughters, fifteen-year-old Mahalia and eight-year-old Penny, are left in the care of Isabel Flood, a local baby-sitter and religious antiabortionist. The story is told through the eyes of Penny, who watches as Mahalia gradually falls under the influence of Isabel. Mahalia begins attending church, women's meetings, and even protests with the zealous Isabel. When Marguerite returns, she finds that her older daughter is in danger of becoming as obsessed with the antiabortion cause as Isabel. The title of the novel is taken from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem. The novel starts off slowly but gains momentum halfway through. Wild-child Penny brings energy and humor to this quiet tale of a family struggling to hold itself together. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


From Kirkus Reviews
This time out, Sharp gets as preachy as her pro-life antagonist, in a compelling but decidedly one-sided exploration of the abortion issue.The Daigles are a family of fiery Louisiana Catholics transplanted to the bleak prison town of Stein in upstate New York. In the summer of 1977, it becomes clear that widowed mother Marguerite is losing her battle against the bottle. The more Marguerite drinks, the more her older daughter, teenaged Mahalia, gravitates toward Isabel Flood, neighborhood busybody and humorless antiabortion zealot. Without especially liking Isabel or her ideas, Marguerite nevertheless lets her exert ever-greater influence over Mahalia's life. In fact, when Marguerite goes off with boyfriend David Slattery to dry out, she leaves both Mahalia and pesky eight-year-old Penny in Isabel's care. In one hilarious scene after another, Isabel drags the sisters along on her daily rounds to convert the town's weaker-willed denizens. Little Penny fights her every step of the way, singing dirty versions of "Barnacle Bill The Sailor" at the most inappropriate moments. When Marguerite finally returns home, sober and married, she must fight Isabel for Mahalia's affection. Assisting in this effort is her salty but big-hearted brother, F.X. Molineau. Matters come to a head when Isabel and her fellow right-to-lifers discover that the high school is teaching a poem on abortion called "The Mother." Not only do they picket the school and pass our gruesome pictures of aborted fetuses, they break into the library and pour pig's blood on the free-speech display. Sharp knows how to create wonderfully quirky characters and set them against each other in bizarre situations. But this latest effort shares the central flaw of its predecessor (Crows Over a Wheatfield, 1996): she just can't resist pouring on the ideology. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Craig Seligman, New York Times Book Review
"Sharp has the born novelist's gift of breathing life into her characters. I loved this book . . . Sharp's gifts are enormous."


Barbara Lloyd McMichael, Seattle Times
"This story is a book-discussion group's dream."


Olivia Abel, People
"[T]his beautifully written story . . . will resonate with all those who have ever laughed or cried at their own family's absurdities."


Stephen Amidon, USA Today
". . . wonderfully inventive."


New York Times, Notable Book of the Year
"The leading character has the depth and energy to become indispensable to people whose lives or children are out of control."


Publishers Weekly
"Sharp brilliantly navigates the political and religious waters that swirl around the pro-life movement."


Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year -- now available in paperback. When Marguerite Daigle, a "seventh generation lapsed Louisiana Catholic," develops a drinking problem, her eight-year-old daughter Penny runs wild, and her teenage daughter Mahalia flees into the arms of a fanatical right-to-lifer, Isabel Flood, who provides the structure Mahalia has been craving. With a tension that builds from the first page, I Loved You All is a lyrical, funny and moving portrait of family life and of the peculiarly American politics of abortion rights.


About the Author
Paula Sharp was born in San Diego, California in 1957. The daughter of a nuclear physicist and an anthropologist, Sharp was raised by her mother in North Carolina, New Orleans and Ripon, Wisconsin. During Sharp's childhood, her mother excavated pyramids and ruins in Mexico, and Sharp's sister, Lesley, later became a prominent anthropologist and scholar of Malagasy history. In her early twenties, Sharp spent a year in the Brazilian Amazon, where she wrote her first novel, The Woman Who Was Not All There, which was published to critical acclaim in 1988, and won the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voice Award. Through her mid-thirties, Sharp lived in Jersey City and worked as a catholic school teacher, Spanish-English translator, secretary, and criminal investigator, and after graduating from Columbia University law school in 1985, she served as a public defender for the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan. She is also the author of the novels Crows over a Wheatfield and Lost in Jersey City, both New York Times Notable Books, and of the short story collection, The Imposter, which won the Wisconsin Library Association's BANTA Award. She has received numerous literary honors, including an NEA fellowship and the New Jersey Distinguished Author Award. She now resides in New York State, and writes full time.

FROM OUR EDITORS

In an interview on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," a political pollster asserted that abortion was not a first- or even a second-tier issue in this year's presidential election. Funny, because that's the impression I have about Paula Sharp's new novel, I Loved You All. The title is taken from the last few lines of Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Mother," a poem spoken to "the unborn," and abortion, as a moral issue, is central to the story. But morality, not abortion, is the operant word here. As usual, Sharp (in this, her fourth novel) takes on not just topical issues but the ethics and principles of human behavior that embrace them all.

In the small, upstate New York town of Stein in 1977, eight-year-old Penny Daigle -- precocious, curious, irreverent -- makes her way through the summer under the watchful eye of good and righteous Mahalia, her older sister, and live-in babysitter Isabel Flood, a right-to-lifer who favors ankle-length skirts and prim straw hats. Meanwhile, the enchanting, provocative, beautiful Mrs. Marguerite Daigle, a loving though neglectful, alcoholic mother, dries out at the Place, a rehab hundreds of miles away. During their mother's absence and in the time following her return, Penny and Mahalia are caught up in Isabel's crusade, attending countless church services, tagging along on daily door-to-door pro-life campaigns, and, finally, witnessing a dramatic First Amendment challenge leveled at the local high school library. Weaving in and out of the vicissitudes of that summer and the lengthy flashbacks that lead up to it are Francis Xavier, or F. X., Marguerite's once-blind brother and the children's uncle, and David, Marguerite's soon-to-be-husband. It's they who provide steadying hands to these women and girls as a battle between good and evil ensues.

The wonder of this novel -- no, of this novelist -- is her willingness to explore the murky territory on which this battle is truly fought. The means by which Sharp accomplishes this has much to do with the brilliance and complexity of her characters. Surrogate mother Isabel is admirably responsible and willing to reckon honestly with her own foibles. She is also fanatical and finally destructive -- almost as much a culprit as the violent men with whom she aligns herself. And Marguerite, because of her seemingly infinite capacity for spontaneity, creativity, and love, is the mother we all want. In fact, it is this woman's capacity not only to give but also to receive affection that sets an important standard for Penny, who observes, "[David] pulled my mother's jacket collar up higher around her neck and leaned toward her to say something. It was a gesture full of such tenderness that I almost called out to them both, in order to hurtle myself into their moment of connection...." But there are also her secrets and drinking that lead, in time, to a very real dereliction of duty.

The reinvented game of Parcheesi that Penny plays with her uncle, a game "...so full of reversals, of near losses, suddenly converted into gains, of colors shifting into and out of alliances and rivalries, that I became lost in the tangle of our moves and played on my feet, circling the board instead of sitting down in front of it," is the perfect metaphor for life in the world bounded by Ms. Flood and Mrs. Daigle. And playing on her feet is exactly how Penny navigates her way through those life-altering months. She is ever the prankster, pouring vodka in Isabel's picnic punch, turning flips on the playground at school, turning herself -- and thus the world -- upside down. Like the Braille her uncle holds in such affection, Penny's own alphabet of perception and reaction "has the beauty of rebellion and the resilience of the underground."

Sharp's book is so quotable that I'd like to set aside my own descriptions, summaries, and opinions in favor of yet another passage from her clear, evocative prose. The storytelling in I Loved You All fairly trembles with real and hard-won wisdom, much of it delivered to Penny by her uncle, for whom language is at once the origin of and the container for all knowledge as well as all deception. Here is a man, big as a house in both size and spirit, who is able to distill the language of ethics and morality into a form we can easily comprehend: "The worst things people ever do, they do because they believe they're fighting what's wrong. In that way, goodness introduces evil back into the world and the circle is complete." This book, too, is complete, full, spilling over with the things for which we turn to art: beauty, truth, unity, a mirror to show us back to ourselves with an instructive and forgiving eye.

—Susan Thames

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year — now available in paperback.

When Marguerite Daigle, a "seventh generation lapsed Louisiana Catholic," develops a drinking problem, her eight-year-old daughter Penny runs wild, and her teenage daughter Mahalia flees into the arms of a fanatical right-to-lifer, Isabel Flood, who provides the structure Mahalia has been craving. With a tension that builds from the first page, I Loved You All is a lyrical, funny and moving portrait of family life and of the peculiarly American politics of abortion rights.

Paula Sharp is the author of the novels Crows over a Wheatfield (an Editor's Choice of the San Francisco Chronicle and a 1996 New York Times Notable Book), Lost in Jersey City, and The Woman Who Was Not All There, and a short story collection, The Imposter. She has received an NEA fellowship and the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voice Award. She lives in New York.

FROM THE CRITICS

Craig Seligman - The New York Times Book Review, August 27, 2000

Sharp has the born novelist's gift of breathing life into her characters. Even the minor characters seem to get up and step off the page. The addled churchwomen in Isabel's circle, in particular, are funny endearing creations. I could have done happily with more of just about everybody...I loved this book probably more than it deserves, but I can't help it - Sharp's gifts are enormous.

Craig Seligman

Sharp has the born novelist's gift of breathing life into her characters. I loved this book . . . Sharp's gifts are enormous. —New York Times Book Review

Stephen Amidon

. . . wonderfully inventive. —USA Today

New York Times

The leading character has the depth and energy to become indispensable to people whose lives or children are out of control.

Barbara Lloyd McMichael