All the Living by C.E. Morgan

All the Living Reviews

• 
  Tara

  This is the highest compliment I can pay to a book: I miss it. I finished it a a week ago but didn't have time to review till now. If Morgan had written a book thousands of pages long, I would read every one.
  
  This book exemplifies "quiet," that term all lit writers hate to hear when they submit to agents and editors, as it almost always comes with a rejection. I've never read a quieter novel than this one. Really only three characters. One setting. Nothing much happens. It's all the internal wrestling of the orphaned Aloma, the main character, and her intense observations of the farmland and the living. Morgan can stretch a moment or a simple gesture to fill several pages.
  
  Outside of a handful of times when I felt she may have overedited and used the thesaurus too much, I devoured every carefully worked phrase, sentence, scene. I've never enjoyed a writer's prose as much as I enjoyed Morgan's. That this is a first novel is extraordinary. That it was written in 14 days, one of those mystical happenings only explained by some spiritual muse. I don't envy her having to follow this with a second book.
  
  I plan to keep this and read it again and again. It's not easy to follow a character who "can't trust the world to make her happy for more than a minute at time, and generally less than that." It's not easy to be in the mind of a character who wonders if it's her partner who makes her unhappy, or herself, someone who isn't entirely likeable. But the language and the power of Morgan's deep insights into human behavior made it worth this reader's while. Highly recommended to readers who enjoy poetic prose, social psychology, and rural settings.
• 
  Hugh

  This has been chosen as a February group read for the 21st Century Literature group, and I started it early. This is a very impressive debut novel, poignant and full of wonderfully atmospheric and poetic descriptions that really bring its remote Kentucky tobacco farm setting to life. To a British eye/ear, much of the language feels quite alien - there is plenty of local slang and Morgan does seem to like creative usages of nouns and adjectives as verbs. I don't want to say too much more now because I don't want to preempt the discussion.
• 
  Viv JM

  This book really got under my skin and I'm finding it hard to pinpoint exactly why. The way Morgan uses language is lyrical and arresting, and the sense of place is exquisite. The book explores themes of love, belonging, grief and compromise, and the overall feeling it has left me with is a sort of wistful melancholy. I feel like I need to go back and read it all over again!
• 
  Paltia

  The eternal quandaries of the human condition rarely change. This story is no exception. There is Alona. Orphaned at so young an age she has no memories of her parents. Moved to an overcrowded relative’s home she is sent to live at a girl’s school. Here she discovers something that graces her with a sense of achievement as well as an outlet for her emotions. She learns to play the piano. It gets her juices flowing and becomes the driving force of her life leading her to those inevitable twists of fate that life is made up of. What can a girl who never knew nurturing from others, who never attached, know of giving and receiving love? Don’t fault her for what she doesn’t understand. She has no template, no experience, no models. As the story unfolds she becomes involved with two men, Orren and Bell.
  It’s in these relationships that she carelessly tests and pushes the men’s boundaries. Her fear of being stuck in a grey world without escape leads her to risk losing what she has. But, how much of a loss would that be? She recklessly compounds the already existing hurt in Orren and Bell. It cuts deeply, for if her relationship with Orren was so average her behavior wouldn’t prove so potentially damaging. The combined fears and cultural prohibitions prevent all three characters from enjoyment of the present. They are in a constant state of what if. There is betrayal and lies. The kind of terrible lies that lead to a howling anger at a world left less sparkling. A story of a woman who steps too boldly and thoughtlessly in a world of man made restrictions.
• 
  Caterina (on hiatus)

  It was always dissonance that she liked best.
  
  
  
  How difficult it is for humans to understand and communicate with one another — even lovers. How difficult to discern and form lasting, mutually supportive relationships and marriages. How difficult it is to embrace life in the face of death and all the forces that push us towards despair. And how to discern the path between love and ambition, between thinking that going elsewhere is the answer and embracing life here and now, honoring the commitments already made to each other. And maybe it's not in the either-or but in the dissonance, the vibration between these conflicting notes, that life is real life.
  
  This is a fine debut novel, an intense deep-dive into a few transformative months in the life of a young woman driven by dissonant desires. In spare, beautifully crafted sentences, sensual evocations of place, lyrical eroticism and spot-on Appalachian dialect, it grapples with these issues -- of commitment, responsibility, and morality; of faith and doubt; of lives circumscribed by poverty, culture and religious milieu; and of the traps this kind of life -- or perhaps, life in general -- seems to set for young people -- or for women -- or perhaps, for people in general. And of the hope that remains.
  
  ...madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for better a living dog than a dead lion. -- Ecclesiastes 9:5 (epigraph)
  
  Aloma Earle -- a character who conveys a visceral sense of aliveness -- discovers her own talent and passion for classical piano at an Appalachian settlement school in rural Kentucky, and wants to take herself out of the dark mountain hollow to a life she imagines will be both literally and metaphorically brighter. It is unexpected and almost shocking when the sight of the hills affects her not with their beauty but with an almost PTSD-level dread at the thought of being stuck there forever. Morgan is good at this kind of unexpectedness; her prose is always fresh.
  
  
  
  At the same time, in a way that is almost animal (and beautiful, even breathtaking) Aloma initiates what turns into a passionate relationship with a seemingly free young man, a student from the state agricultural college. Orren Fenton is attracted in turn to Aloma's independent, combative personality: I can see you're nobody's fool, he says.
  
  Their carefree, student relationship takes the plunge into real life and Orren into adulthood when his mother and brother are killed in an accident, leaving Orren alone in charge of his family’s small, drought-stricken tobacco farm. Although Orren is indeed free in the sense of being single, Aloma soon learns that he is unfree in other ways she never imagined. When, at his request, Aloma joins him to take on a wife-like role, confusion ensues on both sides with regard to their mutual intentions and level of commitment. Both grapple with the transformation wrought on Orren by his grief and desperation, while Aloma seemingly grapples alone with her desire to play piano seriously.
  
  At Orren's suggestion, Aloma finds work playing piano for the church his mother attended -- not really very satisfying for a classical pianist, but she manages also to practice her own music. As she plays, the pastor, Bell Johnson becomes attracted to her, thinking she is available -- Aloma has concealed the fact that she is living with Orren, which is unacceptable in that time and place. And Aloma's ambivalence to marriage grows with the reality of what living with Orren will mean. Although both Aloma and Orren are now orphans, their experience of orphanhood is almost diametrically opposed. Aloma cannot remember her parents, and has no ties. Orren is bound and tied to his ancestral home in a way Aloma can't fathom. From the walls of his living room, dozens of pairs of eyes stare at her, all the way back to hand-tinted portraits of Confederate soldiers. What has she gotten herself into? There are no glib answers. I found this an interesting twist of the threads of modernity and tradition -- Aloma is modern in her mobility but traditional in her (traditionally womanly?) sense of the importance of religious faith to a mature life -- handled seriously by Morgan yet with a delicate touch -- while Orren is modern in his separation from religion but traditional in his commitment to marriage, family and land, and history.
  
  From my perspective, there was no shortage of red flags on either of these two men. At times I found myself thinking "Run away, Aloma, run away!" Weirdly, both Orren and Bell have old pianos in their homes that have been so badly neglected that they are beyond restoring to playability. Oh good grief ... I'm pretty sure that heavy handed omen was a deliberate dose of black comedy.
  
  
  
  I loved the way Morgan conveyed the complexities and dissonances of Aloma’s character, her almost breathtakingly combative conversational and even physical relationship with Orren Fenton, and her more ambiguous chaste friendship with Bell. Aloma is both “relatable” and not entirely likable — her gratuitous bitchiness and deceptions can come back to bite her. Yet there was also something very real and good about Orren and Aloma's developing relationship, and I'm someone who believes that just because a relationship is difficult doesn't mean it isn't right, and I felt that Morgan left that possibility open.
  
  The novel’s ending was both surprising and ambiguous, with elements of tragedy and hope leaving a lot to chew on. I would like to know what happens in Aloma’s life, which, given her personality promises not to be boring. Now I want to read everything else C.E. Morgan writes.
  
  
  
  4.5/5
  Updated/revised my review 12/15/2018 after having some time to chew on my thoughts about the book a while longer.
  
  Image credits:
  1. Abandoned piano: Photographer Roman Robroek, Daily Mail.com. (Actually in Italy not Kentucky!)
  2. Old church in Lynch, Kentucky. Photographer Bryan Woolston, Daily Mail.com.
  (For a paper with such a bad reputation, Daily Mail seems to have good photo spreads -- assuming they are correctly attributed. As an American I actually had no idea of the reputation of Daily Mail when I found these pictures by Google searches ...)
  3. Man harvesting tobacco during a drought near Midway, Kentucky. Photographer Charles Bertram, Lexington Herald-Leader.
  4. Traditional tobacco barn with drying tobacco leaves, Bloomfield, Kentucky. Photographer Linda Bruckheimer, NettieJarvis.com.
• 
  Angela M

  I might have given this 3 stars if I based it solely on the story which is slow moving and where nothing seems to really happen . Then I thought about how much the writing conveyed and decided 3 stars wouldn't be fair .
  
  There's no need for me to give a synopsis of the book ; you can read that yourself . I can only tell you that I could see the drought on this tobacco farm probably somewhere in Kentucky. I could feel Aloma's emptiness , her desire for a happier life , her need to fill the void in her life that has been wanting of family and love . I could feel Orren's grief and his burden of responsibility to save the family farm.
  
  I can say that the ending was not what I would have hoped for early on or even in the middle of the book, but was satisfied that this was how
  it should be . 4 stars.
• 
  Elisa

  Non sapevo praticamente nulla di questo libro quando ho iniziato a leggerlo, eppure in qualche modo ha corrisposto alle mie aspettative, è rimasto fedele alle emozioni che mi ha trasmesso l'immagine di copertina.
  Cercavo una storia di natura (anche umana) desolata, solitaria e silenziosa ed è quello che ho avuto. Tutti i viventi è un romanzo lento, quasi senza trama, quasi senza dialoghi, quasi senza sviluppo narrativo, eppure si tratta di una lucida e acuta analisi dell'animo umano. Si parte condividendo le grandi speranze iniziali della protagonista e si finisce condividendo la sua rassegnazione. Insomma, non viene data un'interpretazione positiva della vita umana. Eppure, se lo si vuole vedere, uno spiraglio di luce c'è. A volte bisogna mettere da parte le proprie ambizioni e quello che può sembrare un accontentarsi è invece imparare ad apprezzare ciò che già abbiamo e ciò che il nostro cuore ha scelto, anche se l ci saranno difficoltà.
  Tutti i viventi è un romanzo vago e allo stesso tempo implacabile e i sentimenti che mi ha lasciato sono complessi da descrivere, posso associarli ad un vago senso di malinconia.
  Sicuramente c'è dell'altro ma da una parte devo ancora finire di elaborarlo e dall'altra probabilmente non sono riuscita a coglierlo perché troppo flebile o perché non sono stata abbastanza attenta e sensibile.
• 
  Ariel Gordon

  IT might seem strange to recommend a novel about a drought set in the U.S. south while we endure our northern flood.
  
  But a conflagration is a conflagration, and Kentuckian C.E. Morgan's All the Living is a damn fine distraction.
  
  This lean little novel, Morgan's first, tells the story of Aloma and Orren, a young couple who attempt to run the family farm after Orren's mother and brother die in a tragic accident. Two things get in their way: the drought that has settled over the region and the fact Aloma and Orren's relationship isn't sanctified by marriage.
  
  While we don't know precisely when the novel is set, in the Kentucky small-town time and place they inhabit, it matters that Aloma and Orren aren't married.
  
  And if that isn't enough, worry over losing the crop - and, by extension, the farm - is turning the grief-stricken Orren inside out.
  
  Aloma - from whose point-of-view the novel is told - agreed to join Orren at the farm and act as farm wife because she loves him but also because she doesn't know what else to do.
  
  What she doesn't understand is running a farm, never having even lived in a house before.
  
  Another thorn is that Aloma discovered at school that she was a gifted pianist. And the piano at the house that Orren promised was in working condition is ruined - "the sound was spoiled like a meat."
  
  While she can learn to cook and clean, to feed the chickens and hope for rain, Aloma can't unlearn her ambition, and it only take a month without playing the piano before she gets a job playing hymns at a local church.
  
  This is where Aloma meets Bell Johnson, a farmer whose version of noblesse oblige means that he, like his father, half ruins his own farm so he can also preach at the church.
  
  Bell, a bachelor with a suspicious mother and, worse, a ruined piano of his own at home, is drawn to Aloma, or, rather, to Aloma at the piano.
  
  Aloma likes that Bell can talk circles around what is bothering him and that he seems to need her, unlike the flinty, distant Orren. But she is trapped playing house with Orren, and it is questionable whether marriage to Bell would satisfy her ambition any more than marriage to Orren would.
  
  But no matter your notions of duty versus ambition or marriage versus living in sin, it is hard to ignore the sexy, muscular writing on offer here. Also of note is Morgan's skill in depicting the desperate but aimless energy of early adulthood, particularly from a female perspective.
  
  Although the book does nod towards Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer-winning Gilead (2004) - in some ways, All the Living feels like a reverse-angle telling of that story - Morgan is more interested in exploring dissonance than harmony.
  
  And while Morgan's master's in theology from Harvard Divinity School shows in her rendition of entire sermons, Bell's is a small, practical theology, heartfelt and palatable even to those who prefer their fiction secular.
  
  (from my review which appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press April 5, 2009.)
• 
  reading is my hustle

  Oh, this is a beautiful and melancholic read.
  Astonishingly, so.
  
  The story is a timeless one. To Stay or To Go. The setting is a small town at the base of the mountains in Kentucky. The descriptions of farm life, church, love, and internal conflict are flawless. (It is in these descriptions that it is evident C.E. Morgan went to Divinity School at Harvard).
  
  The ending broke my heart. But I would read it again without a moment's hesitation.
  
• 
  robin friedman

  All The Living
  
  The title of C.E. Morgan's first novel derives from Ecclesiastes 9:5. Morgan quotes the Scriptural text as an epigraph: "There is an evil in all that happens under the sun, that the same fate comes to everyone. Moreover,the hearts of all are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion."
  
  The Biblical quotation serves as an apt summation of Morgan's book. The novel, which deals with themes of loneliness, death and suffering, suggests that life is full of woe and leads inevitably to death. But life remains precious in offering hope and possible redemption. The book raises important religious issues. The power of music also plays an important part in the story. The author has studied and felt both music and religion. She is a graduate of Berea University, Kentucky where she studied English and voice, and she holds a master's degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School.
  
  The novel is set on a small isolated, and bleak tobacco farm in contemporary rural Kentucky. Three weeks before the novel begins, a young man, Orren Fenton, has lost his family in an automobile accident. He returns to work the family farm together with his lover, Aloma. Aloma was orphaned at the age of three and lived with relatives until sent to a boarding school at the age of 12. At the boarding school she fell in love with and learned to play the piano. She aspires to serious musical study.
  
  Orren and Aloma have difficulties in their relationship. The taciturn Orren works incessantly on the farm struggling to make a living and to pay off debt. Aloma has no experience with farming or, indeed, with homemaking. She becomes bored and restless. More importantly, she misses the piano and her music. Orren and Aloma quarrel repeatedly. At Orren's suggestion, Aloma takes a job playing the piano at a small church in a village, Hansonville, 20 miles up the road. As the story develops, Aloma is tempted to leave Orren and begin a relationship with the preacher, Bell Johnson. Bell, 36, lives with his aged mother and works a farm of his own inherited from his father. He preaches part-time and without pay.
  He has never married, and feels this as a loss.
  
  Each of the three major characters is lonely and searches for love. Orren and Aloma are both orphans and have difficulty understanding each other. Orren seeks meaning in his life by working the land that had been owned by his family. Aloma is seeking to pursue her music and to attain a degree of independence. Both Orren and Aloma have sharp, rejecting parts of their characters which threaten to drive them apart.
  
  The book describes well scenes in rural Kentucky, the difficult fields, the backbreaking work of tobacco farming, old, rickety, and unmaintained houses, dirt roads, small stores, and spare, primitive churches. Much of the novel explores the consequences to Orren and Aloma in this community of living together without marriage. But Morgan's book has a much more universal cast in its exploration of the relationship between commitment and independence, sexuality and love, and religion and secular activity. Each of the three primary characters is drawn with care and with particularity. The book is written in an understated, lyrical tone; and the dialogue generally flows into the narrative without being set-off with quotation marks.
  
  While Orren and Aloma are the focus of attention, much of the wisdom of the book is delivered by Bell, the preacher. Bell studied briefly at a university, but he abandoned his studies when he despaired of worldly wisdom. He is shown in this book as a persuasive, eloquent and thoughtful individual, far from a stereotyped fundamentalist. The sermons that he gives frame the book, with their emphasis on human loneliness ("we are all lonesome men", p. 78), on the wisdom of understanding the nature of self and selfishness (p. 79) and on the difficulties of overcoming grief and despair (p. 117). These and other words of Bell give some grounding to his own life situation and choices and to those of Orren and Aloma.
  
  An impressive debut novel, "All the Living" is gritty and pensive and avoids cliche. It makes an excellent choice to read for oneself or in the company of a book group.
  
  Robin Friedman
• 
  S

  This book really affected me. It was all I could think about during the couple days I spent reading it, and it is still stuck in my head a week later. It made me think about whether love is just a matter of circumstance, and whether, in the search for freedom/happiness, it is ok to settle for mediocrity or what one is "comfortable" with. Morgan has a very distinct way of writing, which plays into the vivid imagery of the book. She uses words in a pleasantly strange way (not strangely pleasant) that describes things at a whole new level. Overall, this book is amazing. I have been reading a lot lately and this is by far the best book I have come across in a very long time. There are plenty of useful reviews about the plot, but my meaningful contribution is just to say, you have to read All the Living!
• 
  Thomas

  One measure of a fine writer is how much tension he or she might wring from an ordinary moment. Nothing much happens in this enthralling little book and yet the language held me under its sway. I might be tempted to call it a ballad for a vanished way of life, only I think the moments rendered in these pages could have happened in the long ago or some day in the future, because there are things about human beings that don't change from age to age, and good books capture just such truths. It's not a perfect book, but one of the best I've read in recent memory.
• 
  Cynthia

  I read a lot of the reviews for this book and was prepared to be disappointed because of the hype but found myself intrigued. It's another one of those modern books without a lot of plot but Morgan more than makes up for it with her wonderful, subtle writing and her insight adjacent aha's. The ending surprised me as well. The main characters are a pair of kids who are forced to grow up fast and they chose to agree to hold up one another. They almost fail at this last but they almost succeed. The boy has been plunged into grief with the loss of his brother and mother. The girl has never had any family. Neither can see the extent of the other's pain much less help mitigate it. One of the best things Morgan does is blur the line between internal and external thinking and activities. She doesn't use quotation marks so you're never quite sure if something is said out loud or if it's a thought. This might sound like it would be irritating but it actually adds to the depth of the insights which she helps you feel *you've come to on your own. Cleverly done. I hope she keeps writing.
  
  PS I wish Goodreads used a 10 star format. I'm torn between a 4 and a 5 for All the Living but since there are no more gradations I'll give it a 5 rather than the 8 I'd give it on a 10 point scale.
  
• 
  Janice (JG)

  This quiet little story was told so intimately I could almost hear her breathing - Aloma, the young woman who tells us about her days spent with herself in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people.
  
  For most of the book I didn't know if I liked Aloma or not, but I knew absolutely that I could relate to her, and I wasn't always happy about that.. There were also moments throughout when simple sentences would sink into an awareness that I had never realized and yet suddenly recognized, and shared.

  Every evening was like this, the night taking the day with no clear demarcation of its passing so she could not mark the precise moment when night arrived again. It took her continually by surprise and she had grown to hate that.

  This would have been a 4-star read right up until the last thirty or forty pages, when what should have happened did happen, and even tho' it took me by surprise I found myself falling in love with Aloma, and Orren, and especially the author C. E. Morgan for telling this simple, profoundly honest story.
• 
  Neil

  After I finished this book, I looked up a few reviews of it. A word that seems to be used quite often is "thoughtful" and another is "quiet". For me, I'd add "claustrophobic": a very limited set of characters and very little that actually happens. My reaction was to want to escape, to get out to a bigger place, and I think this was at least partly the author's intent. There is some excellent writing that conveys time and place very well. But there is also some slightly annoying writing because the author loves a poetic phrase perhaps a bit too much (for my taste, anyway) and she does love to verb a noun which can sometimes be effective and can sometimes be annoying.
  
  I was a bit disappointed by the ending, if I'm honest. But I'm not going to say anything here about that. I read this because it is a book selected for the 21st Century Literature group, so any discussion about plot and ending will happen there rather than here!
• 
  robin friedman

  All The Living
  
  The title of C.E. Morgan's first novel derives from Ecclesiastes 9:5. Morgan quotes the Scriptural text as an epigraph: "There is an evil in all that happens under the sun, that the same fate comes to everyone. Moreover,the hearts of all are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion."
  
  The Biblical quotation serves as an apt summation of Morgan's book. The novel, which deals with themes of loneliness, death and suffering, suggests that life is full of woe and leads inevitably to death. But life remains precious in offering hope and possible redemption. The book raises important religious issues. The power of music also plays an important part in the story. The author has studied and felt both music and religion. She is a graduate of Berea University, Kentucky where she studied English and voice, and she holds a master's degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School.
  
  The novel is set on a small isolated, and bleak tobacco farm in contemporary rural Kentucky. Three weeks before the novel begins, a young man, Orren Fenton, has lost his family in an automobile accident. He returns to work the family farm together with his lover, Aloma. Aloma was orphaned at the age of three and lived with relatives until sent to a boarding school at the age of 12. At the boarding school she fell in love with and learned to play the piano. She aspires to serious musical study.
  
  Orren and Aloma have difficulties in their relationship. The taciturn Orren works incessantly on the farm struggling to make a living and to pay off debt. Aloma has no experience with farming or, indeed, with homemaking. She becomes bored and restless. More importantly, she misses the piano and her music. Orren and Aloma quarrel repeatedly. At Orren's suggestion, Aloma takes a job playing the piano at a small church in a village, Hansonville, 20 miles up the road. As the story develops, Aloma is tempted to leave Orren and begin a relationship with the preacher, Bell Johnson. Bell, 36, lives with his aged mother and works a farm of his own inherited from his father. He preaches part-time and without pay. He has never married, and feels this as a loss.
  
  Each of the three major characters is lonely and searches for love. Orren and Aloma are both orphans and have difficulty understanding each other. Orren seeks meaning in his life by working the land that had been owned by his family. Aloma is seeking to pursue her music and to attain a degree of independence. Both Orren and Aloma have sharp, rejecting parts of their characters which threaten to drive them apart.
  
  The book describes well scenes in rural Kentucky, the difficult fields, the backbreaking work of tobacco farming, old, rickety, and unmaintained houses, dirt roads, small stores, and spare, primitive churches. Much of the novel explores the consequences to Orren and Aloma in this community of living together without marriage. But Morgan's book has a much more universal cast in its exploration of the relationship between commitment and independence, sexuality and love, and religion and secular activity. Each of the three primary characters is drawn with care and with particularity. The book is written in an understated, lyrical tone; and the dialogue generally flows into the narrative without being set-off with quotation marks.
  
  While Orren and Aloma are the focus of attention, much of the wisdom of the book is delivered by Bell, the preacher. Bell studied briefly at a university, but he abandoned his studies when he despaired of worldly wisdom. He is shown in this book as a persuasive, eloquent and thoughtful individual, far from a stereotyped fundamentalist. The sermons that he gives frame the book, with their emphasis on human loneliness ("we are all lonesome men", p. 78), on the wisdom of understanding the nature of self and selfishness (p. 79) and on the difficulties of overcoming grief and despair (p. 117). These and other words of Bell give some grounding to his own life situation and choices and to those of Orren and Aloma.
  
  An impressive debut novel, "All the Living" is gritty and pensive and avoids cliche. It makes an excellent choice to read for oneself or in the company of a book group.
  
  Robin Friedman
• 
  Carol (Reading Ladies)

  Character driven with a distinct sense of place, this is one sad story of two young people who are living their lives in quiet desperation on an isolated tobacco farm in rural Kentucky. Aloma was raised in a less than nurturing home by her aunt and uncle after her parents died when she was three. Orren is a quiet loner who is grieving over the loss of his family. After they marry, their days are filled with hard work on the farm and they face isolation because of the rural setting and also because they have no family or friends. Aloma has her music, but she struggles with feeling a lack of partnership with her non communicative, controlling husband. As the story concludes there is little hope of a better future for them. One hopes that Aloma’s music will bring some happiness and meaning into her life. She has a bit of spunk to pull that off.
  
  The isolation that Aloma faces in this story reminds me of the isolation that Laura Ingalls Wilder describes prairie wives facing in the biography “Prairie Fires.”
  
  This is a book that follows a current trend of not using quotation marks for dialogue which makes the reading more difficult than it needs to be. I am not a fan of this trend!
  
  For more reviews visit my blog readingladies.com
• 
  Megan

  "She wondered what kind of luck was required to be someone other than the person you were born to be."
  
  I admit I came into this book with expectations, given that Morgan's second novel, The Sport of Kings, looms large in my recent reading history and is one of the best things I've ever read. (My copy of it lives nearly permanently on my desk, so that I can page through it and read pieces of it when I need something good.) Morgan's scope and prose in this debut are pared back a little in comparison, and the prose didn't work quite so well for me; for example, as I read this book over the course of a few hours (and with great attentiveness!), I was able to easily notice the overuse of particular words.
  
  But this is still a beautiful book, about grief and love and easy things and hard things, about the motion of life and death, and about the wildness of the earth we live on, about the deep wildness (maybe it's a soul, idk) that lives inside of us. God, grace, and living with mystery & unknowability. (Unsurprisingly, the sermons were some of the most interesting thematic aspects to this book.) It's about a summer season of drought. It's about Aloma, a long-orphaned young pianist who moves in with her grieving, recently-orphaned boyfriend on the suffering farm he's inherited. It's about the distance between them. It's an intimate novel centered around Aloma understanding her feelings. My own emotions about and understanding of Aloma flashed back and forth violently while reading, and I wouldn't recommend it to readers who don't want to read a novel about a young woman coming of age and wrestling with losing her immaturity and ignorance, but I really liked this.
• 
  Lorileinart

  First of all, a gripe.
  I confess my aversion to books who condescendingly offer ridiculous titles like this one...All the Living: A Novel
  Do we really need these qualifiers? Henceforth:
  Barack Obama: A President
  Tuna-Noodle Casserole: A Food
  So there. I do feel a bit better.
  On to my review, which is leaner than my complaint.
  All the Living (A Novel) is a well-written book that tells a simple story. It fits neatly into the Gap Creek/Plainsong genre which deals in the strife and sorrows of our country brethren who live beneath the Mason-Dixon Line. C.E. Morgan writes authoritatively; I would assume she grew up on a farm. She devised a number of memorable scenes and characters. My only admonishment is for her over-usage of random and rare adjectives...they are very distracting, especially for wordistas who give pause to the unfamiliar. I don't expect to consult my dictionary while reading dialogue from characters who speak like Jethro Bodine. Like the title, it's unneccessary.
• 
  Martha

  I am blown away by this story. All I can say is C.E. Morgan has written the richest and most beautiful story I have read in a long time. She has captured something extraordinary on paper--the people, the land, the smells, the heat, the fear, the joy, the sadness. Her writing is impeccable, readable, soul-searching. In the end, I felt like I was there, like I knew these people---what an excellent read! I'm afraid to try the next book on my list---it may pale in comparison.
• 
  Marc

  CE Morgan's writing is a delight. Enough so to overpower some issues I had with pace and depth of character. But it reads more like a sketch (or a "snapshot in time" as my GR friend Linda so aptly put it). Morgan's sense of place and hardship dig under your nails with a poetic visceralness that stains. It's a fascinating exploration of struggle, love, and independence set against an unforgiving, rural '80s America.
• 
  Bob Brinkmeyer

  This is a powerful and sobering novel. I am really surprised that it is not better known, but perhaps that is coming after the success of Morgan's recent novel, THE SPORT OF KINGS. What stands out immediately in ALL THE LIVING is the stark, chiseled prose that itself invokes the stark, hardscrabble life of rural Kentucky. The protagonist Aloma and her partner Orren have been brought together by their explosive attraction and passion; but now, living together, they face difficult tests of everyday life on a small farm. Their physical satisfactions only momentarily deflect their competing obsessions that threaten to tear them apart: Orren is fixated on the deaths of his mother and brother in a horrible accident (as well as the fight to save his crop during a drought), while Aloma dreams of a life as a musician somewhere far from the farm. Orren's focus on the past and Aloma's on the future leaves little for the present. I'll not give anything away except to say that in Morgan's world nothing is set in stone, neither satisfaction nor despair, as life can--and does--change dramatically in a moment. Or as Almona puts it: "She couldn't trust the world to make her happy for more than a minute at a time, and generally less than that, but her life had to be borne."
  
  Readers of Cormac McCarthy and Wendell Berry will find echoes of both in this novel, as in a sense Morgan brings to bear Berry's mostly hopeful agrarianism with an austerity resembling that of McCarthy's Tennessee novels. ALL THE LIVING is quite an achievement, all the more so for being a first novel.
• 
  Kate

  I loved this.
  
  Aloma is a mission-school educated orphan teaching piano in west Texas when she meets Oren (forgive the spelling mistakes, I listened to the audio version), a young farmer's son who is studying at Texas A&M. Aloma dreams of being a concert pianist and Oren of a large and successful farm, but both of their dreams are shattered when Oren's mother and brother, the only family he has left, are killed in a car accident and the two young lovers move back to the family farm.
  
  The influence of Marilynne Robinson is evident from the first pages, though not
  Gilead, as its Bible infused passages would suggest, so much as
  Housekeeping. Much like
  Housekeeping, the landscape hovers over All the Living - a force that buffets and suffocates Aloma and Oren, giving this debut novel the feel (just as in
  Housekeeping) of a post-apocolyptic narrative.
  
  Highly recommended. I can't wait for more from C.E. Morgan.
• 
  Laura

  Wow. All the Living reads like a waking dream on a hot August afternoon. The language is a delerious mix of colloquialism and lyricism. Like Coomer's Decatur Road, I feel myself wanting to read it twice; once for the sheer enjoyment of the story and the second time to revel in the language. Ms. Morgan writes a story that seeps into you, permeates like the musk of the soil, envelopes the reader with the acrid scent of the farmstead and the heat of hard work and through it all Aloma's nervous fingers are tapping out melodies on door frames and tabletops and her denim-clad thighs while Orren's hands remain motionless at his sides. If you like All the Living, you might search out a copy of Paul Jaskunas' Hidden.
• 
  Kevin

  "We grieve and wonder how come the rain won't fall and we know there's a answer to that despair, because that despair is a question, it ain't a answer, that's what we got to remember: God is the answer, the four gospels is a answer to that despair and to where our spirits go. And yet--he paused, breathed, and said-- man will be to suffer. And his voice fell to nothing for a moment as he ruminated and placed one hand in his pocket, and then removed it and shook it against his thigh as if he were rattling a tambourine against his thigh. He looked up and smiled. He gripped the Bible tighter. He waited a moment, just smiling, and then he said, But, hallelujah, it's going to rain."
• 
  Ian

  Really enjoyed this literary fiction tale that unfolds over one summer in rural Kentucky. It is a compelling story about a young woman who was an orphan at age 3, and who has just set up home with her first boyfriend, an inexperienced tobacco farmer who has also just lost his family in tragic circumstances. They have a passionate but flawed relationship and feeling isolated physically and emotionally, she is tempted to stray with a local preacher. The summer heat of both the locale and the relationships are beautifully drawn. Well worth a read.
• 
  Brooke

  I found this book... forgettable? It tells the story of Aloma, a young women who finds herself living on an isolated tobacco farm with her lover, Orren, who recently inherited the farm following his family’s death in a tragic accident. Aloma struggles to come to terms with her new life, her relationship with Orren (who is distant at best), and her friendship with the young preacher at the church she plays piano for.
  
  While it was well-written, I found the story too slow and lacking in any driving plot and events. Ask me in a week what it was about, and I doubt I’ll be able to tell you...
• 
  Amanda Miska

  I was so swept up in this world, the characters, the language. I want to go back.
• 
  Carol E.

  The writing in this book is beautiful. This is funny to me, because the first time I tried reading it, I hated the writing! I thought the author was "trying too hard" with excessive use of metaphors and similes. I put it down for a couple of weeks, and the second time I tried, I loved it and got hooked right in. This time I felt the writing was wonderful. I love good writing such as this: the sun raged through the windows.
  
  The author has a deep understanding of human emotions and relationships, covering everything: loss, love, marriage, daily living, faith, death, communication. Superb. The only reason I didn't give it five stars is because I was frustrated with the main characters' failed attempts at communicating and with truth being hidden/covered up. OTOH, this is what humanity does to ourselves and to each other, so I think I will change my rating from 4 to 5 stars.