Seize Your Copy All We Ever Wanted Was Everything Authored By Janelle Brown Released As EText

read entertaining. Interesting premise but wish I'd gotten more of the mom perspective and wish she'd spent a little less time out of her mind.
Janelle's book was a really easy read meaning this is the kind of fiction that grabs you early on and you can't wait to come back to it when you have to put it down.
Each of the women in the book, from the mother to heryear old andyear old daughters, is complex, working through difficult issues that are nonetheless easily relatable.
I know Janelle's a great writer but I was really impressed with her first novel and I look forward to the next one.
Predictable and kind of depressing, but not in a seminice, cathartic way, These are the All We Ever Wanted Was Everything's opening words:

"June in Santa Rita is perfect, just perfect, The sun sits high in the sky which is itself just the right shade of unpolluted powder blue and the temperature averages a mild eightythree.
It isn't too hot to play tennis, Silk doesn't stick. The pool at the club is cool enough so that swimming is refreshing, and the summer fog that usually creeps in off the ocean is held at bay, its gray tentacles undulating right off the shore.
"

I chose this book as a distraction, thinking it would be a light and fluffy like an omelette, if somewhat indulgent, poolside reading pleasure I could leisurely tackle over the course of a few days.
As it turned out, I read the whole thing in one sitting, trading in a good night's sleep for some unexpectedly thoughtprovoking, disturbingly reflective entertainment, and a brief nighttime nap instead.
The telltale dark circles under my eyes this morning were the price I had to pay for such a trade, but that's why God invented concealer.


This book is full of searing, profound insights into what a slow descent into madness looks like, when idyllic facades become torn asunder and seemingly perfect lives are indelicately and permanently ripped apart at the seams.
It's about the pitfalls of suburbia, the pangs of regret, the naivete and idealism of youth being replaced by the cynicism of adulthood, the nature of greed and avarice, the lies people tell themselves to compensate for the fluctuations in other people's loyalties and the disappointments and vicissitudes of time.
It's also about the bloodthirsty entrepreneurialism of the Silicon Valley dot com boom era and the extravagant lifestyles, displaced morality and revamped definitions of ambition and success that ensued in its wake.


Author Janelle Brown discloses how she grew up in suburban Silicon Valley and was once herself a struggling twentysomething feminist editor working as a technology journalist during

the dot com boom era.
She says she was "both fascinated and appalled by the influx of this ludicrous wealth," and remarks how "Silicon Valley became the American Dream on steroids, distorted beyond recognition into something vaguely monstrous.
" The end product of her experiences, memoirs, and observations all rolled into one is this addictive and gripping novel.


On the same day that his company, Applied Pharmaceuticals, launches an IPO the stock sitting pretty ata share only two hours after the opening bell announces they've gone public in the blink of an eye, Paul Miller's.
million stock options net him a fortune that's almost a half a billion dollars,

All of this is overwhelmingly joyful news to his wife, Janice, who is utterly elated but strangely, cannot manage to reach her husband for the duration of the day.
Her tennis partner stands her up, Things go wrong, one after another, all day long, Then she discovers that her husband has just left her ironically, for the tennis partner/"best friend," Beverly, who uncharacteristically stood her up that morning.
She discovers this when a process server hands her divorce papers and then when Janice relentlessly rings her husband's office phone until he finally answers, Janice hears Beverly's voice in the background, saying "You need to tell her, Paul.
She needs to know. "

Worse still, she discovers her soon to be exhusband plans to completely screw her out of the new fortune.
Coifax, Paul's company's brand new product for hair re growth that showed an unprecedentedsuccess rate in clinical trials Applied Pharmaceuticals in general the roughlymillion in stocks from the IPO launch he's planning to keep all of it.
And with an especially underhanded maneuver which Paul executed one year earlier, it appears as though he just might have a legal leg to stand on.


To top it off, her two daughters, Margaret and Lizzie, have dramas of their own unfolding, from which Janice feels incapable of protecting them.
Margaret walked away from her own imploding life in Los Angeles after receiving Lizzie's pleading phone call begging her to come home.
Margaret figures, why not after all, she's,in debt to all of her credit card companies, and everything she's poured her heart and soul into for the last four years including her romantic relationship with a rising movie star who has dumped her for a legitimate movie star has fallen apart.


There's sex and affairs and betrayal, Vicodin popping and champagne pounding, pot smoking, crystal meth snorting, pathological lying, serial promiscuity, gossip, rumors and other socialite ammo, deconstruction of all bull! and a woman who only discovers who she really is deep down as her life is unraveling before her very eyes.
An excellent read. Read it quickly and did enjoy it but there were no redeemable characters, Brief summary
Janice is overly critical of her daughters and handles her impending divorce with alcohol and drugs.
Her oldest daughter, Margaret, has just split with her famous boyfriend ofyears who is now dating another movie star, her magazine is going under and she's on the verge of bankruptcy.
Lizzy isand sleeping with any boy who shows interest in her because she thinks it will make her feel loved.


What I liked
These characters felt very real to me, probably because they are all so flawed.
They all have issues that they're trying to hide from the world and each other, I'm happy that the book ends on a happier note, Janice, Margaret and Lizzy come clean with everything they've been hiding from each other and find a way to accept each other, flaws and all.


What I didn't like
Most of this book really brought me down, All of their situations are awful, It bothered me that Margaret was pushing Lizzy so hard to get an abortion,

Brief thoughts
This wasn't a bad book, but I didn't find it amazing either.
The message I'm taking away from this is that wealthy people don't have it all, or even have it all together, and that everybody has to work for the things that matter most: family.
This book was so full of constant cringing, it was almost artful how it was done, I can not recommend. A colleague recommended this to me as a light summer read, so I was astounded to see that it was so wellwritten.
I should have read the last page first, because when I read the author's biography I found that she had been a journalist makes sense.


This author used a very simple format of one chapter per character in a rotating manner, and this time it worked.
It worked because the characters were so welldeveloped, interesting and welldeveloped that you really wanted to see what each was going to do next.
Somewhat surprisingly I found myself best identifying with theyear old Lizzie the most, followed byyearold Margaret, though even their mother was a sympathetic character.


I read this voraciously while on vacation to the point where my fiance was getting upset with me for not paying attention to him.
Even when I finished and moved onto a new book I found myself thinking about the characters: what would happen to Lizzie next Would everything really work out Needless to say, I found it somewhat addictive and a great read.
I actually hope there is a sequel, something I usually would avoid, .