All Saints' Day

Great writing, great story. Benoit's amazing debut novel says something important about the ways that every family lives and dies and keeps living, how people are remembered and forgotten, and how love (and hate, and callous indifference) work into this. The style, mixing English with Cajun French, gives a sense of immediacy that allows the reader to inhabit the tense world of Maringouin. The hopes characters have pinned on gambles such as bush-track horseracing and oil rigs are heartbreaking even as the details are unerring and fascinating. The texture created by the multiple points of view gives a full, round portrait of the Gidot and Bueche families, and offers a welcome counterpoint to outsiders' misguided notions of what life in Cajun southern Louisiana has really been like: here it is, honestly, with all its bad health and poverty and real tragedy. Best book I've read in years.

All Saints' Day is a moving story of people in south Louisiana--their lives, their loves, their hopes, and misfortunes. Although there is a common thread, each chapter is a self-contained tale. The descriptions of the people are poignant--there is a girl who, by the side of the road, cradles the head of a dead dog in her lap. It is thought provoking--the story of a man who can only be considered schizophrenic as he fears that man others around him are machine men (robots). And many other characters that are both strange and familiar, yet all are caught in the nexus of just trying to survive in a poor area. The realism of All Saints' Day should be expected. The book was written by an author who grew up near Baton Rouge, within sight of the Mississippi River. His eye for detail insures that this book remains a favorite of readers for Southern literature.