All Rivers Flow to the Sea

ALL RIVERS FLOW TO THE SEA Being a fan of Ms. McGhee's, I am very slowly working my way through her writing only because I don't want to run out of her wonderful books. She is amazing! This book is listed as a TEEN book. Adults, have at it. This is one heck of a good read. Ms. McGhee hits home with her stunning story of young teenaged Rose trying to deal with an accident that leaves her sister, Ivy, in a coma and on a respirator. Poor Rose -- dealing with the death of someone you love is hard enough and hurts so badly that I cannot imagine being part of the accident that leaves Ivy at death's door and Rose OK. Rose has a hard time dealing with this situation also and this book tells the story of her coping. Rose cannot imagine life without her sister, Ivy. Ivy and Rose are two extremely close sisters. The sentence that keeps repeating throughout the book -- "IVY AND I HAD AN ACCIDENT. IT WAS DUSK IN THE ADIRONDACKS, AND WE WERE COMING AROUND A CURVE AND THE LIGHT BLUE TRUCK CAME SLIDING" -- that ONE sentence hits home each time you read it and each time it is like a blow to your mind and your gut. Rose tries to cope with her sister's situation and in the best way she knows how. Rose visits Ivy each day and it hurts her that their mother will not set foot in the hospital. How Rose deals with her life -- a life that is a gift she cannot deal with -- why is she alive and her sister is in a coma? This young girl deals with many, many issues and you cannot help but admire her. The characters ring true and life-like. Ms. McGhee sneaks in a few characters for a visit from her other novels. This is good, I really like this. Rose makes it through each day, has a hard time coping with her mother's non-interest in Ivy, her mom's obsession with making paper cranes, dealing with the kids at school who don't understand how Rose is feeling and what she is going through emotionally. Through no fault of their own, her friends are treating Rose in a different way, and while they cannot see this, Rose certainly can and this makes her life even harder. I LOVED this book. Having lost my dad 14 years ago, I could really feel Rose's pain and know how she was totally feeling. The phrase WE ALL WALK AROUND WITH A STONE IN OUR SHOE really is true. EVERYONE has pain and sorrow in their life, but living is what makes all that hurt worth the journey. Rose had to learn that it was OK that she was alive and living. She had to learn how to deal with the accident and what happened to her sister, Ivy. And we all have to learn how to deal with stones in our shoes. READ THIS BOOK. I highly recommend it. It is filled with great characters, some sadness, but mostly it is filled with love. Thank you! Pam

Wow. Alison McGhee really gets it. The terrible, omnipresent, obsessive pain of losing someone who is so much a part of who you are. I loved the repetition of the stark details of the accident, replayed over and over again in Rose's head as she tries to go back to "normal" life - as she tries to be the one who survived. How can life go on as normal when someone's heart and soul have been ripped to shreds? Rose sees the beautiful spring day, hears the other kids talking, feels the cool night air, and then remembers "Ivy and I had an accident", rediscovering the pain of loss anew each time her mind brings her back to this tragic realization. "All Rivers Flow to the Sea" is so beautiful and melodic and heart-wrenching and hopeful. I'm not sure why this is marketed as a young adult book. It deserves a much larger readership. I am geniunely amazed that Ms. McGhee could pack so much into one little book. This is one of a very few books I will read over again. Wow.

In All Rivers Flow to the Sea, Alison Mcghee captures the essence of raw, unresolved grief (not that the loss of a beloved family member is ever completely resolved). I picked up this book and, except for sleeping, didn't put it down until I read the final page. Her repetitive use of text imitated the repetitive thoughts that rumbled around at one time in my own grief-stricken brain, with reality occasionally breaking through. I also settled right in to her method of bouncing from telling a story as it unfolded while making repeated excursions into the past, with more being revealed, sentence by precious sentence, during each historical trip. I don't quite know what to make of the few less-than-stellar reviews that are posted. I wonder if the reviewers who wrote them have been through a personal loss of the magnitude that Alison has obviously been through. Yes, I realize this is fiction, but I can't help thinking that only someone who has been through the loss of a personal loved one could illuminate the harsh anguish and heartache this author portrays.

This review will be brief. A teenager girl Rose, and her sister Ivy, are in a car accident in the Adirondack Mountains where they live. The sister who was driving is left in a coma. As Ivy sleeps on, Rose attempts to live with the pain of loss -- her own, and the losses that surround her. This is an illuminating look at grief and at what happens after a severe trauma when the event itself refuses to stay in the past and replays the present tense. What Mcghee achieves with words -- the fluid and static movement of life and death itself -- is beyond what I can use words to describe. Her writing is brilliant -- stark, poetic, never forced. This book reads like a dream, it has that mesmerizing and sometimes surreal quality. Not surreal in the extreme sense of the term, but in the sense that what happens in day to day life is sometimes simply beyond one's grasp of reality. The writing style is repetitive, but only insofar as Rose's thoughts continue to circle around "the accident," and the repetition builds until you begin to notice slight differences. I don't know what to call this technique -- it is like a translation of what happens in your mind, into words on a page. Never overdone, just the suggestion, which keeps you knowing that for every time Rose repeats to herself "Ivy and I had an accident," this stands not for one repetition, but for hundreds, thousands. This is a story/stories of how Rose finds a way to let go of Ivy *and* to let her live, and what she learns about her own resilience and her own desire to live and love in the process. Simply and beautifully written. For younger adults? I think this is classic literature of a contemporary age. That it is full of emotion, and focuses on a 17-year old girl, does not make it a "young adult" book, although young adults will be able to relate to it, and will undoubtedly never forget it. Even beyond the scope of the narrative, this book will make you cry -- not just because of the events in the book, or of the pain of the protagonist, but because the realities your life will insert themselves in-between the pages, beyond the words, and make you remember anything important that you may have forgotten, and there is always something worth remembering.

When I checked this book out from the library I knew that "All Rivers Flow to the Sea" was cataloged as a teen fiction book. Normally, that is a reading level that I don't even look at, but this was written by one of my favorite authors, and Minnesota resident, Alison McGhee. McGhee is best known for her novels "Rainlight" and "Shadow Baby", but is also the author of two children's books and a young adult novel ("Snap"). Everything she has written has been quite excellent, though I didn't love "Snap" the way I did her three adult novels. "All Rivers Flow to the Sea" is a short novel about a teenage girl dealing with grief and loss. Rose and her sister were in a car accident, another driver hit them and her sister has been in a coma for months. Her mother hasn't been to the hospital since the day of the accident. Rose does not know how to live her life alone because she has never been alone and going back to school she does not know how to deal with the looks and the whispers that her sister is a vegetable and someone should pull the plug. What Alison McGhee gives the reader is a very real feeling story about Rose and how she deals, acts out, comes back, and finds healing in her life and acceptance about her sister. This is a novel that presents a true human challenge for Rose and one that I do not remember reading about, and certainly not quite like this. Likely, this novel will appeal to teenage girls and girls who have had to deal with grief in their own lives. Alison McGhee has done something remarkable with "All Rivers Flow to the Sea." Not only has she written an excellent short novel for a particular age group, she has written a novel that transcends the age group. If I didn't know that this was "teen fiction" I would easily put this among her adult novels. She doesn't talk down to her reader, she is incredibly sympathetic, and "All Rivers Flow to the Sea" happens to be just as good as "Rainlight" or "Shadow Baby". That is high praise indeed, because those two novels (especially "Rainlight") are exceptional. -Joe Sherry