She richly tells a story of a battle to hold on and to let go. Toews' All My Puny Sorrows brings forth for me. It's the same kind of freedom I feel when something in an author's voice connects with something inside of me and brings it forth, blooming, bursting, breathing. I could sit down at the nearest piano and chop out a decent 'Twinkle Twinkle' but it's the reader in me that is my looking glass into the freedom some feel when keys move beneath flowing fingers. We all connect differently to the world around us. I was always more notes-in-the-margins than music notes my piano lessons (as well as the redundant pleas to switch to guitar lessons because, somehow, THAT would be different and marvelous and oh-so-me) instilling a vast appreciation for those that were musically skilled without, however, bestowing any of that skill upon yours truly. Often pondering the pros and cons of the stolid Mr. Poe and repeatedly pound out 'Oom Pa Pa' accompanied by the intermittent SWACK of his favored wooden ruler meeting errant knuckles while my brain was, inconveniently, elsewhere. I'd take up my seat next to the note-murmuring Mr.

Read moreĪt the behest of my well-intentioned mom, the standard issue piano lessons of your average middle-class child crept into once-weekly residency during several years of my childhood. In her beautifully rendered new novel, Miriam Toews gives us a startling demonstration of how to carry on with hope and love and the business of living even when grief loads the heart.

Can she be nursed back to “health” in time? Does it matter? As the situation becomes ever more complicated, Yoli faces the most terrifying decision of her life.Īll My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and responsibilities. Her long-time agent has been calling and neither Yoli nor Elf’s loving husband knows what to tell him. Yoli is a beguiling mess, wickedly funny even as she stumbles through life struggling to keep her teenage kids and mother happy, her exes from hating her, her sister from killing herself and her own heart from breaking.īut Elf’s latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. Elfrieda, a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. You won’t forget Elf and Yoli, two smart and loving sisters. In her most passionate novel yet, she brings us the riveting story of two sisters, and a love that illuminates life. Miriam Toews is beloved for her irresistible voice, for mingling laughter and heartwrenching poignancy like no other writer. SHORTLISTED 2014 – Scotiabank Giller Prize

All my puny sorrows book review