Member Reviews

This is a story about a dysfunctional family.
I did enjoy this book but I didn’t love it. I appreciated the themes in this book but was disappointed at the writing.

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Jami’s writing is fantastic. The characters were engaging and real. This is a very timely book and I devoured it.

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I thoroughly enjoy the way Attenberg is not afraid of a diversion, it enables my sometimes flighty mind to be kept engaged with the story by avoiding my attention being distracted by diversions of its own! An accessible read that made me consider again the themes of family, loyalty and whether it's ever possible to overcome disconnects with people that would be considered central to our lives. Quite hard to see where Victors redeeming qualities lie, but maybe that's the point...

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How do you reckon with someone close to you is generally considered a bad man? Exploring and unpicking Victor Tuchman's life as he reaches its end, Alex - his daughter - faces just this dilemma, and the journey to breaking these patterns moving forward. A fascinating tale of dysfunction, and considering the complicated nature of being human, even if it's a terrible human.

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I loved this book! Even though, actually, not much happens in the way of action, the stories from all the characters were beautifully and vividly drawn and I found myself very sad that the end of the book was coming. I thought Jami did a good job of making some of the most unlikely characters actually very sympathetic, and I also loved the little back stories she wrote of very small, minor characters that eventually get entwined at the end. I would definitely recommend this book - it's a great depiction of human emotions as we get older and have to choose between responsiblities etc. Fabulous.

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A very of the moment read, this feels very timely, on the heels of the Me Too movement. Victor is on his deathbed, having led a somewhat shady life with no real comeuppance until he is accused of sexual assault. His family have their own dark secrets, and this affects how they react to his upcoming passing. A dysfunctional family drama, it was difficult to like any of the characters, so although that made me feel removed from them, it allowed me to observe their actions in a more way that felt like I gained more from the book. A good read, and helps me to feel like maybe my family isn’t so bad!

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When Victor Tuchman suffers a heart attack no-one seems particularly bothered except for his daughter-in-law Twyla. Wife Barbra is obsessed with keeping her steps up, daughter Alex is keen to find out the truth and son Gary is just hiding from the truth. Victor was not a nice man, a ruthless busineesman with shady dealings he finally received his comeuppance when accused of sexual harassment, but his family also suffered and the secrets they all kept mean that Victor is not really mourned.
This is a solid enough family melodrama but it just didn't really grab me. Victor seemed to have no redeeming features and there wasn't really anything to like about the whole family. That makes a book like this hard to enough, as a reader I didn't really invest in it.

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A searing, heart wrenching novel about family dysfunction and toxicity. Jami Attenberg explores the process of grieving the loss of those we simply cannot forgive, nor forget.

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Most of the action in Attenberg’s seventh book takes place on one day, as 73-year-old Victor Tuchman, struck down by a heart attack, lies on his deathbed in a New Orleans hospital. There’s more than a whiff of Trump about Victor, who has a shadowy mobster past and was recently hit with 11 sexual harassment charges. Forced to face the music for the first time, he fled Connecticut with his wife Barbra, citing the excuse of wanting to live closer to their son Gary in Louisiana. Victor had been abusive to Barbra throughout their marriage, and was just as violent in his speech: he could crush their daughter Alex with one remark on her weight.

So no one is particularly sad to see Victor dying. Alex goes through the motions of saying goodbye and telling her father she forgives him, knowing she doesn’t mean a word. Meanwhile, Gary is AWOL on a work trip to California, leaving his wife Twyla to take his place at Victor’s bedside. Twyla’s newfound piety is her penance for a dark secret that puts her at the heart of the family’s breakdown.

Attenberg spends time with each family member on this long day supplemented by flashbacks, following Alex from bar to bar in downtown New Orleans as she tries to drown her sorrows and exploring other forms of addiction through Barbra (redecorating; not eating or ageing) and Twyla – in a particularly memorable scene, she heaps a shopping cart full of makeup at CVS and makes it all the way to the checkout before she snaps out of it. There’s also an interesting pattern of giving brief glimpses into the lives of the incidental characters whose paths cross with the family’s, including the EMT who took Victor to the hospital.

This is a timely tragicomedy, realistic and compassionate but also marked by a sardonic tone. Although readers only ever see Victor through other characters’ eyes, any smug sense of triumph they may feel about seeing the misbehaving, entitled male brought low is tempered by the extreme sadness of what happens to him after his death. I didn’t love this quite as much as The Middlesteins, but for me it’s a close second out of the four Attenberg novels I’ve read. She’s a real master of the dysfunctional family novel.

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I tried hard to like this, but I just couldn’t get there. I am sure the problem is me, but I found it relentlessly negative and depressing and I didn’t want to keep reading. Having said this, I can see it is well done and so I felt it would be unreasonable to give it less than 4 when I didn’t manage to finish it as it may we’ll have the best ending ever!

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A story about an unhappy dysfunctional family. I found it very hard to keep reading.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

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This book follows an extremely dysfunctional family over multiple generations. There are multiple povs and lots of family drama.

I felt like there was so much in this book, like history and detail of the family members and yet also seemed like it wasn't about alot, if that makes sense.

The character that stood out to me the most was the mother/Victor's wife (although i cant remember her name!) I just remember thinking how sad and lonely her life was and how she seemed to have it all together but that it really wasn't the case.

I have read many mixed reviews they seem to be love or hate. I would not say I hated it but I really failed to connect with the story and the characters. Nothing was really that memorable to be other than Victor's death.

The only word I can seem to think of when it comes to this book is cold and that's not just talking about the vibe of the family but the writing itself too. Which I guess could work for some people but didnt work for me.

Thanks netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest reviews

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I've seen a lot of reviewers discuss this book and say that they didn't enjoy it because nothing happened. I think I'm inclined to agree with them. This is a very character driven book, but after a few chapters, the prospect of zero action bores you in advance and you're clamouring for something with a bit more substance to it. I probably won't be returning to this one.

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Victor Tuchman, a mean old crook of a real estate developer suffers a heart attack and as he lays unconscious in hospital, his family reflects on how he affected their lives. His wife, Barbra, knew what she was getting into before she married him, decades ago, weighing material things she desired, things he could provide, against emotional connection he wouldn’t feel and physical violence which he meted out regularly because he was the boss. His daughter Alex struggles with who and why she is, seeking answers from her emotionally distant mother. His son Gary, away trying to resuscitate his flagging career refuses to return to see his dying father. Alex and Gary have spent their adult years disassociating themselves from their parents, striving for more meaningful lives and raising their children with love and care denied them by their own parents. They both succeed to a degree until a year or so before the heart attack, Victor and Barbra inexplicably leave the family home in Connecticut and move to New Orleans, where Gary lives.

Victor is a bit like a menacing tornado or a black hole. Although not actually present for much of the story, which takes place over the course of a few days but moves between past and present and between different characters, he seems to suck in everything around him. Interspersed with the narratives of the main characters are brief glances at lives of the paramedic who takes Victor to hospital, the hospital coroner, another heart attack sufferer and others. Connections are hinted at, some more ambiguous than others.

This was my first Jami Attenberg novel and she writes well in an engaging, fast paced if sometimes slightly breathless style. I thought it worked wonderfully in parts, especially in the beginning. However, I also found the novel somewhat uneven. All This Could Be Yours is primarily a novel about a dysfunctional family but the people and the city of New Orleans also play quite an important part in it and I felt that Attenberg sometimes lost focus between the two strands. At times, I was more interested in the side characters and I didn’t quite buy into some of the main characters’ actions and choices. At the same time, there is a lot I liked about the book. Victor’s shady real estate dealings were quite Trumpian, Barbra’s obsession with furniture fascinating; the beginning and the last part of the book very well done. A very good book to discuss in book clubs. Three and a half stars.

My thanks to Serpent’s Tail, Profile Books and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review an advance copy (UK release) of All This Could Be Yours.

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This book takes place over a day in New Orleans: in the morning an abusive patriarch Victor has a heart attack and by midnight he is dead. The story follows his family as they grapple with the legacy and trauma caused by this brutal and misogynistic man. His wife Barbra is an elegant, beautiful and empty woman cloaked in diamonds and a Fitbit which she obsessively watches as she paces around the hospital waiting for her husband to die. She has lived a life of compromise for comfort, dependence and love - in a heartbreaking scene at her daughter’s birth, she negotiates with her husband telling him that ‘If you ever even think of hurting her, just hurt me instead. But you leave her alone’ (he largely abides by this, except for the 5-6 times when he doesn’t and strikes his daughter nonetheless). The daughter Alex is a lawyer, pressing her mother for the truth on Victor and his criminality, as her mother in turns urges her to forgive her father. She herself is recently divorced from a charming, successful but philandering man, trying to be civil in the aftermath to build a warm, supportive parental network for her daughter. The son Gary is in Los Angeles and is reluctant to be at Victor’s side as he dies, his whole life an attempt to define himself despite the cruelty of his father - early in his relationship with his wife he says, ‘I am the way I am because he was the way he was’. This is a tender and empathetic novel about surviving familial trauma and the catharsis that death liberates the protagonists to pursue.

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I loved this novel of a dysfunctional American family - just my kind of read!

It's very character-driven and I always enjoy books where the minutiae of individual's lives are laid bare.

Many of the characters were not very likeable, but still you ended up rooting for them anyway.

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I enjoyed this story of a family and their coming to terms with the imposing figure of Victor.

I'm not sure the time we spent with peripheral characters worked for me every time the technique was used but some of these small side narratives were well done, and included some of the books best lines.

New Orleans is well evoked and I'm not sure how she's managed it as she doesn't really spend that much time on it - just lovely restrained details that paint an excellent picture.

The family reminded me very slightly of the Roys from Succession - though the circumstances and stories are very different. I'm still not sure what to make of Barbra and I'm not sure if she deserves sympathy or a slap. Thanks to #netgalley for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

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You: My family is a mess
The Tuchmans: Hold my beer

The death of a bad man (Victor Tuchman) takes place over the course of a day and is told through myriad voices recounting the stories of their lives. It's about terrible families, capitalism (good and bad), people (good and bad), toxic masculinity, forgiveness, life, death, love...

Read it in a flash and loved it.

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Fantastic novel about a dysfunctional family. The writing is so on point and the inner lives of these characters so well observed. This book has so much to say about the relationship between men and women.

Reminded me of the writings of Philip Roth.

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