A review by reading_ladies_blog
All the Living by C.E. Morgan

3.0

Character driven with a distinct sense of place, this is one sad story of two young people who are living their lives in quiet desperation on an isolated tobacco farm in rural Kentucky. Aloma was raised in a less than nurturing home by her aunt and uncle after her parents died when she was three. Orren is a quiet loner who is grieving over the loss of his family. After they marry, their days are filled with hard work on the farm and they face isolation because of the rural setting and also because they have no family or friends. Aloma has her music, but she struggles with feeling a lack of partnership with her non communicative, controlling husband. As the story concludes there is little hope of a better future for them. One hopes that Aloma’s music will bring some happiness and meaning into her life. She has a bit of spunk to pull that off.

The isolation that Aloma faces in this story reminds me of the isolation that Laura Ingalls Wilder describes prairie wives facing in the biography “Prairie Fires.”

This is a book that follows a current trend of not using quotation marks for dialogue which makes the reading more difficult than it needs to be. I am not a fan of this trend!

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