All the Best People

Sonja Yoerg

May 2017 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

An intricately crafted story of madness, magic and misfortune across three generations from the author of The Middle of Somewhere and House Broken...
 
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 won’t reconcile and the murmuring she hears isn’t the television. She ought to seek help, but she’s 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.
 
CONVERSATION GUIDE INCLUDED

Ratings and reviews

All the Best People is a new novel by Sonja Yoerg is the story of Carole LaPorte and her family. Carole is forty-four years old, married and has three children. Lately, Carole has been having trouble concentrating and she has been hearing things (that people are mocking her, talking behind her back, the cat is evil). Carole is afraid to tell her husband about her troubles for fear of ending up in Underhill State Hospital like her mother, Solange Gifford. Alison, Carole’s daughter, can tell something is wrong with her mother, but no one will listen to her. She tries to find another way to help her mother. Alison is becoming a young woman and needs her mother’s love and guidance. Janine, Carole’s younger sister, is a widow and has her eyes on Greg Bayliss, Alison’s teacher, as her new husband. Then April Honeycutt, the new special education teacher, and Greg start spending time together. Janine is not going to let April take away her prize. Solange has been in Underhill since she was thirty-four years old. Her husband, Osborn had her committed after the birth of Janine leaving the girls in the care of his sisters. Carole continues to get worse and starts withdrawing from her family. Pick up All the Best People to find out what happens with Carole, how Solange ended up in Underhill, and if Janine gets her man. All the Best People shows how mental illness can affect a family and not just one generation. The story is told from Carole, Janine, Alison, and Solange’s point-of-view. The book takes us back to when Solange agreed to marry Osborn. Solange came from river people in Burlington, Vermont and Osborn from the upper class. This pairing is doomed right from the beginning. A trial case of Ploof v. Putnam divides Osborn and Carole as well as the citizens of Burlington. The changing viewpoints made it difficult to get into the story. I wish the story had been told from third person. The pace of the book slowed down considerably during Solange’s story which I did not enjoy. How Solange ended up in Underhill was a necessary part of the story. However, it was predictable by delving into the division of the classes. I knew where the story would go as soon as the read that Solange and Osborn were from different sections of town. I give All the Best People 2 out of 5 stars. The book is full of unlikeable characters. The only person I found endearing was Lester. I found information to be repeated often throughout the story and the ending was a letdown. A blue box and a pearl figure prominently into the story, but I did not get why (except to represent water). The blurb for the story hints at magic, but the only magic is Alison reading spells from books (there was a definite lack of supervision). I was never able to get into the All the Best People. I did like some of the references to shows and items from the 70s (I was a little girl in the 70s). The author handles the serious issue of mental illness very well. She showed how mental illness was treated in the late 30s and in the 70s. All the Best People was not the right novel for me, but I do recommend Ms. Yoerg’s House Broken.

About the author

Sonja Yoerg, the author of The Middle of Somewhere and House Broken, grew up in Stowe, Vermont, and earned her Ph.D. in Biological Psychology from the University of California at Berkeley. Her nonfiction book about animal intelligence, Clever as a Fox, was published in 2001.