I’m going to echo Caitlin_D’s sentiments regarding Love All: it could have been 5 stars if Callie Wright had finished the damn thing. Instead, it drops off suddenly with nothing really resolved. This caused me to spend the last 50 pages going, “How is she going to wrap everything up in time?”, then thinking, “Oh, I guess she’s just not going to?”. Maybe she’s going to write a sequel, but I somehow doubt it (no teasers on Goodreads, for one). Very frustrating for a novel with such great potential!
Love All focuses on a family in a small town after the grandmother dies suddenly. She leaves behind a husband, the other half of her rather rocky marriage; a career-drive daughter (Anne) and a cheating son-in-law; and two grandchildren: Teddy (a high school star who’s terrified to go to college) and Julia (completely involved in a love triangle that she’s only partly aware of). Their family has been tainted by scandal ever since 1962, when a neighbor published a novel called The Sex Cure, which revealed all of the town’s dirty secrets through thinly veiled pseudonyms. The book rocks the whole town in 1962, and when Julia uncovers it again after her grandmother dies, things change all over again.
Wright had a lot going on in this novel: affairs, unrequited love, family fights, teenage angst. She spent a lot of time setting up plotlines and developing well-written characters, only to suddenly end it with no real resolution. I would have been much less frustrated with the ending had the build up not been so great!
I felt in some way it was mean to lend a book that I knew would drive you crazy (with the no ending and whatnot) but everything leading up to it was so good I had to share the wealth