All We Know of Love
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Four years, four months, and fifteen days ago, Natalie Gordon's mother walked out mid-sentence, before she finished what she was going to say. Now Natalie is traveling twenty-four hours on a bus to Florida to find her mother, to find herself, to find out something about love. Along the way, Natalie struggles to understand her relationship with Adam, a boy she pines for with near-obsession, and to her surprise, she meets people with stories like her own, stories about giving love and getting lost in the desire to be wanted. Acclaimed middle-grade novelist Nora Raleigh Baskin makes her young adult debut with a deeply resonant novel about secrets held and secrets shared, about having the courage to uncover all we know — and don’t know — of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her first YA novel, Baskin's (The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah) portrait of a teen questioning the meaning of love is as candid and alluring as her books for middle-grade readers. High-school sophomore Natalie Gordon embarks on a journey to find her mother, who abandoned her and her father more than four years ago. During her bus ride from Connecticut to Florida, Natalie recalls incidents from her childhood leading up to her mother's departure and mulls over her tumultuous relationship with an older boy, as well as her concern that she may be pregnant. Natalie meets a few people along the way an elderly knitter, a mild-mannered hotel manager and Baskin captures her protagonist's subtle progression from ignoring these people to opening up to some of them; vignettes about the strangers' lives drive home the universal need to be loved. These brief glimpses might leave some readers yearning to know more about these characters but, as Natalie realizes, even minor connections are what are important in life: "Even the temporary, even the transient, even the people who you are never going to see again but who exist because we need them to, because we are human." Ages 14 up.
