If you want to feel the pain of privilege, by all means read this book.
If you enjoy reading about addiction, denial and keeping up with appearance, then this book was written just for you.
If you want sharp social commentary with a little humor, find another author.
All we Ever Wanted Was Everything is an exercise in wretched excess. From the multi-million dollar high tech executive's wife to the humorless feminist daughter, the characters are excessive, shallow and unsympathetic.
I really wanted to like this book. From the blurb it sounded like great fun. Unfortunately, it was pretty much torture to read. The writer is about as humorless as the feminist daughter.
Tell me doesn't sound like a great summer beach read:
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, and 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. Exhilarating, addictive, and superbly accomplished, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything crackles with energy and intelligence and marks the debut of a knowing and very funny novelist, wise beyond her years.
You'd think you would have to love a feminist who actually names here 'zine Snatch.
You'd think that drug dealing pool boys, country club ladies and evangelical neighbors would add (at the very least) great color and a few laughs.
You'd think that a novel about women pulling together would end up being a "feel good" reading adventure.
In all cases you would be wrong.
Obviously, I hated this book!
