All the Best People by Sonja Yoerg

Not my typical genre but I loved it anyway.

All The Best People by Sonja Yoerg
Narrated by Lisa Flanagan
Audiobook 10+ Hours, Released May 2017
Amazon ♦ Goodreads

Vermont, 1972. Carole LaPorte has a satisfying, ordinary life. She cares for her children, balances the books for the family's auto shop, and laughs when her husband slow dances her across the kitchen floor. Her tragic childhood might have happened to someone else.But now her mind is playing tricks on her. The accounts wont reconcile and the murmuring she hears isnt the television. She ought to seek help, but shes terrified of being locked away in a mental hospital like her mother, Solange. So Carole hides her symptoms, withdraws from her family, and unwittingly sets her eleven-year-old daughter Alison on a desperate search for meaning and power: in Tarot cards, in omens from a nearby river, and in a mysterious blue glass box belonging to her grandmother. An exploration of the power of courage and love to overcome a damning legacy, All the Best People celebrates the search for identity and grace in the most ordinary lives.

My Thoughts:

“She pitied him for having fallen in love with her.”

I requested a hold on this book months ago and when my turn finally came up I couldn’t remember why I requested it. Since I waited months for it, I figured I may as well give it a listen and I’m glad I did.

Going in blind isn’t such a bad thing as it kept me guessing. Was it a family drama? A doomed romance? A juicy secret type of book? A book about women’s rights (or lack of them) in the not so distant past? Or a book about mental illness?

It’s a little bit of all of those things and it does them all most excellently.

But mostly it’s about Carole whose mother was institutionalized when Carole was only ten. She was left with an uncaring aunt and basically raised her baby sister Janine. Carole is now grown with a family of her own and has been experiencing troubling “episodes”. She’s been tuning out her family because she doesn’t want them to worry, or worse, to discover she’s been hearing voices in her head. And the voices are getting louder.

The book delves deep into Carole’s story as she desperately tries to keep the madness from creeping in but it also tells the story of Janine (who is a bitter and horrible woman!) and their mother Solange and how their past turned helped shaped them into the women they are in the current day.

I’m not going to give anything else away. If any of this sounds at all interesting to you, give it a listen. The audio narrated by Lisa Flanagan is highly recommended. She’s polished and professional and she’ll drag you down into this story before you realize it’s happened.