All This Could Be Yours (Attenberg) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Attenberg gets so deep into the psyches of her characters that the story ends up seeming electric with ruin, and with possible resurrection…. This is how you write a very good novel about a very bad man…. All This Could Be Yours is full of hope… [but] most powerful when it’s honest… [about how difficult hope is] in the first place.
New York Times


With her sixth novel, Jami Attenberg… ecures her place as an oddly sparkling master of warped family sagas…. All This Could Be Yours is orchestrated with the precision of an opera on a revolving stage.
NPR


Attenberg is a master at excavating the good, the bad and the ugly truths about families, and in this short but potent novel, her richly human characters populate a witty narrative studded with surprises.
People


Told from multiple perspectives, All This Could Be Yours illustrates the heartbreak, isolation and chaos that comes from really getting to know your family.
Time


Attenberg… doesn’t flinch from digging into life’s messiness…. [Her] medium… is familial dysfunction. And the Tuchman family is a matryoshka stacking doll of dysfunction. [This is] an emotionally messy novel, but precise in craft. The narrative voice is complex and profound.
USA Today


Attenberg is on a roll…. Like a little chili pepper in the chocolate, that particular kind of dark laughter is Attenberg’s secret ingredient.
Newsday


(Starred review) A patriarch’s death strains a family’s already fraught relationships in this dazzling novel…. Attenberg excels at revealing rich interior lives—in her main cast and cameo characters—in direct, lucid prose. This is a delectable family saga.
Publishers Weekly


[A] whirling dervish of a novel.… Attenberg is a master of subtlety as she divulges everyone's thoughts…. The unusual twist here is that readers learn all their stories while the characters do not. Contemporary family sagas don't get much better. —Stacy Alesi, Eugene M. & Christine E. Lynn Lib., Lynn Univ., Boca Raton,
Library Journal


(Starred review) Weaving together a riotous assortment of threads, Attenberg tenderly mines [the Tuchmans’] family history and massive dysfunction…. Her characters… inner lives coalesce beautifully into a funny and heart-stirring tribute to the nutty inscrutability of belonging to a family.
Booklist


(Starred review) Prickly and unsentimental, but never quite hopeless, Attenberg, poet laureate of difficult families, captures the relentlessly lonely beauty of being alive. Not a gentle novel but a deeply tender one.
Kirkus Reviews