Camille Pagan's book Everything Must Go spoke to my own situation of having a mother with dementia. While our situation is different, I still saw some of my own concerns shared on page in this book. The story is told from the perspective of both the mother, Sally, and daughter, Laine. Besides dealing with her family, Laine is in the middle of her own "midlife" crisis. She has recently lost her beloved canine companion, is longing for a baby, and questioning her marriage to the point that she has asked her husband for a divorce. As a professional organizer, she seems to be able to get everyone else's life in order but fails to do the same thing for herself. When she is called home to Brooklyn to deal with the issues involving her mother Laine agrees to go so that she can get some distance from her husband and possibly some perspective on her situation. Her family is not a lot of help. They love Laine's husband and can't see what the problem is. Then they see Laine's new unattached status as the answer to their problems. Laine is expected to just move in with mom and take care of things. We learn that Laine has always been a people pleaser and bows to the requests of those around her at the expense of her own wishes and dreams. She learns a lot about herself through the course of the book as well a lot about her mother.

As stated earlier in this review, I was drawn to this book because of the dementia story. I found that part of the story to be realistic and what kept me interested in the book. I wanted to see how the family handled the situation. I was disappointed in the fact that the family doesn't look past either a nursing home or in home care. There are other options, and I was surprised that the author didn't include specialized assisted living for memory care as something that is available for families looking for help for a parent with dementia. A nursing home is depicted as the WORST thing ever and I thought that was rather insensitive and uninformed. There were not as many chapters from Sally's perspective, but I thought that they truly tied the book together. The divorce story and second chance romance included in the book was really not that important to me. The divorce seemed very rushed and the romance very too convenient. The book was good, but I can't say that I loved it. This was my first Camille Pagan book. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4

My sincere thanks to Lake Union Publishing and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book and give my unbiased opinion of it.

Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to review this ARC with honesty.

Laine is a woman on the verge of realizing she's not happy with her life. She has a husband and is trying to kick off a new career choice while also still grieving for the loss of her dog. Laine takes the loss hard as Belle was more than just a dog or pet, she was her best friend. While her family feels she's taking things a bit too serious with the dog's passing, Laine can't seem to let go of the pain.

While she continues on her with her life, something shakes loose in her mind about what she actually wants in life....and it becomes apparent, it's not another dog. Laine realizes she's ready to be a parent. But the more she analyzes her marriage, patterns start to emerge about the topic never being brought up often and when she broaches the subject on being a parent, her husband pacifies it with "someday" or "not quite yet."

And while she struggles with life choices, concerns arise with her mother's declining mental health that has Laine running between her present life in Michigan and her past life in New York.

Laine who has always been scared of shaking the boat and disappointing her family finally does something drastic that will change her life and create a brand new path. And that path possibly includes those from her past she'd never thought possible.

Overall, my opinion of this book is that it shows the different facades of dealing with mental health issues. A parent's decline in it can be life altering and scary. Laine struggles with helping her family while also not ignoring her own dreams. I did find Laine a bit dry and annoying at times but as she's called a people pleaser, it does set the tone for the majority of the book. A couple of times, I put the book down and had to double check with other's reviews about whether this was the majority of the book. Like when does this woman get a backbone? As a whole, the book was decent. I did find some things odd in regards to certain relationships outside of Laine that just...don't make any sense. Like someone trying to tie up loose ends in a happily ever after move that just didn't seem quite organic and more forced. But regardless, the book was interesting enough for me to keep reading and I was satisfied enough with the ending.

Happy Pub Day! I was ecstatic to get an early copy of Everything Must Go. Camille Pagán is one of my go-to authors - everything I’ve read by her I’ve loved.

Laine feels her marriage falling apart. Her husband, Josh, and her are wanting different things at the stage of life they are in. At the same time, Laine gets a call from her sister who is worried that their aging Mom is showing signs of dementia. While things are up in the air in her personal life, Laine goes back home to help her sisters care for their mom. Secrets are revealed, second chances are presented and the entire family dynamic is changing.


Things I loved:
-flawed, realistic characters that are so relatable(Camille is the queen of creating these types of characters, and they’re always my favourite to read about)
-exploring the mother/daughter and sister/sister relationship and the family dynamics and complexities involved within
-situations that many people can relate to: aging parents, establishing a balance between putting people you love first vs your own happiness
-Laine’s personal growth, you really get to know her go on her journey of self discovery alongside her

4.5 stars

Laine has just made two major decisions for her life. One, she wants to be a mother, no matter what it takes, and two, she needs to divorce her husband. Laine receives a call from her sister, Hadley, that their mother, Sally may have dementia and she needs to come home, at least temporarily to NYC. Laine travels home to assist her sisters with figuring out a care plan for their mom, but soon discovers secrets their mom has been hiding which had a major impact on Laine’s life.

Everything Must Go is a heartbreaking, emotional tale of the love and trust between mothers and daughters and sisters, written beautifully with just the right amount of drama to keep you turning the pages late into the night. Laine learns that home doesn’t have to be a physical place, but can be wherever your heart is happy and content.

I LOVED it! Just what I needed in my life. Laine, the main character, grows so much in this book. She’s always putting aside her wants and needs for others and in the process loses herself. A good balance is necessary and that’s the message I took away. Family bonds between sisters and their mother, secrets, regrets, and hope!

I love everything Camille Pagan writes. She’s an auto-buy author for me. Her writing is witty and her stories are relatable with characters who are deeply human. I always want to be friends with her characters!

Everything must go was my first read by the author and now I understand why so many people loved her previous stories.

I really loved Laine and while I wanted to shake her up and make some sense of why she's always putting herself in the last place, I can totally relate to her. Wanting to please everyone around you while also trying to stay true to yourself it’s a hard job, let alone feeling unappreciated for all the efforts that she's making.

It's a nice story about family and marriage and all the difficulties that ensue. I think many lovers of women fiction books will enjoy it.

🆓📖Very grateful to the publisher for my review copy through NetGalley

This was a fun story! Very cute and sweet but with deep and real elements. I love second chance romance and found this one to be very well done. I read this in one sitting and loved spending time with the characters. The main characters mother felt so painfully real, my grandfather has Alzheimers so reading about the mother with memory problems hurt a little bit. But it was really well done and I'm glad to have read this!

Everything Must Go by Camille Pagan is a wonderful, heartfelt story about love, family, and second chances. It also explores the strength of the bond between mother-daughter, as well as that of the bond between sisters.

Laine Francis’ life is in turmoil. More than anything, she wants to be a mother, but her husband has been putting her off for years, saying he’s not ready. Laine’s biological clock is ticking so loudly that it’s all she can hear and so she tells her husband she wants a divorce since they clearly don’t want the same things. On top of that, she has received a frantic call from one of her sisters, begging her to come to New York to help with their mom, who hasn’t been herself lately. Even though Laine has no desire to come back to New York, she knows she is the only sibling who doesn’t have small children to care for so she’s the logical choice. When Laine arrives in New York, she runs into Ben, her former best friend. She hasn’t seen Ben since they had a huge falling out years ago, so seeing him again after all this time brings back a lot of memories. She hopes seeing him again will provide the opportunity to mend their relationships, but she soon realizes that her sisters were right about their mom. Something is definitely wrong and it’s not just the occasional forgetfulness.

I think this is a story that many readers, especially those with aging parents, are going to find so relatable. As the sisters try to determine the full extent of their mom’s memory loss, they have to have tough heart-to-heart conversations about what to do, how best to care for her, while maintaining as much of her independence and dignity as possible, etc. I loved how realistically these relationships were portrayed and how the sisters all came together to help their mom. I also loved that in addition to Laine’s perspective, which we got since she was the one taking the lead when it came to their mom, we also got the perspective of Sally, so we could see what was going on in her head, both as she realized what was happening to her and as she realized that her girls knew as well. Not only that, but we also get an inside look at some pretty major secrets Sally has been keeping from her family. I found Laine’s journey to figure out what she really wants from her life, especially regarding motherhood, just as compelling as Sally’s story. There were so many different layers that kept me turning the pages and fully invested in seeing how things would turn out for both Laine and Sally.

While Everything Must Go touches on some pretty weighty topics like divorce and dementia, it’s ultimately a feel good story that left me shedding a few happy tears by the time I got to the last page.

Thank you so much Amazon Publishing for providing me an e-ARC in exchange for the honest review.

Laine and Josh are married. She wants kids but Josh keep postponing it. Until how many years, Laine want a divorce. Laine’s family really loves Josh, and Hadley can’t believe why are they divorcing. When Laine discovered that their mother Sally has dementia she get worried to her mother and always checking her. Especially Sally (their mother) got worse with her memory loss.

Sally was a very kind mother. She always thinks about her daughters. Especially Laine, now that she knows that Laine wants to get divorce. Overall, I loved how they loved their mother even tho she has dementia.

Everything Must Go is the latest from Camille Pagan and it comes out this Tuesday from Amazon Publishing - thanks to Lake Union Publishing and NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion. This was a good book to read while backpacking because literally everything must go, everyday. I'm the type of traveler who organizes every little thing into its stuff sack and proper space in my pack, and I loved hearing about Laine's transition to become a professional organizer. I can understand how satisfying it is to know where everything is when you need it! The book covers the emotional turbulence of losing a beloved pet, deciding a marriage is no longer working, and handling a parent with memory issues - heavy topics! However, Pagan's writing eases the severity, and I enjoyed reading it during my trek on the Arizona Trail.

Everything Must Go
by Camille Pagan
4 stars

Lanie is a people pleaser or so everyone says she is, she doesn't see it. After her dog passes and she starts thinking about what she really wants in her life and will her husband be able to give it to her. One day she decides she is done, time for a divorce. While she working through her own stuff her sister calls and explains she thinks their mom has been slowly losing it. Lanie has to go see and be with her mom while trying to figure her own life out.

This book takes a look at Alzheimer's in the beginning stages and how it can affect different family members especially when two sisters seem to have their life together more than their other. I work with a lot of elders in different stages of the disease, it takes a lot to explain to the family what is happening especially when they are in denial. It's a process for the family and the person that's starting to experience it. This book explains very well the whole process of the beginning stages. Of course, they added some romance and drama I'm not sure if they wanted the book to be more focused on that but it did to me.

Thank you, Net Galley and Lake Union Publishing

Camille Pagan is a must read author for me, but this book wasn't my favorite of hers, but it's me, not the book. She's the queen of wrenching your heart out and putting it back together and delivers again on that promise. However, we start off with the main character's 15 year old dog dying. My girl is turning 15 today, so this hit a little close to home for me and reminded me that my time with her is fleeting, and the constant mentions in the book made it hard for me. That said, this family was great and I would love to see more of Laine and Ben.

⭐️⭐️⭐️. Sorry for the slight but not really spoiler, but if you have an older pup, I wanted you to be warned.

This is such a great book. I knew I would like it because Camille Pagan is a great author, but it is even better than I originally thought. I was drawn to the main character, Laine, and I felt so empathetic towards her and everything she was going through. A troubled marriage, an unfulfilled family, and a suffering mom are just a few huge life events she juggles and she holds herself together pretty well despite the emotional weight they each hold. She is married to a husband who loves her but not the idea of a having a baby, her ex best friend is in her life again and she realizes she not only wants him to stay in her life, but as more than just friends. Does she want to move to NY and care for her mom who revealed she has Alzheimer’s, and where Ben lives? Or does she want to stay in Ann Arbor, MI where she has a new and lucrative business and is ideal for raising a family? Does she want to stay married to Josh? Always living her life as a people pleaser, recent events have encouraged Laine to put herself first and do what is best for her. She learns living this way is not always perfect, and that someone will likely end up unhappy, but she also becomes stronger and happier as she navigates this new way of living. I loved the focus on family and am in awe of the strong bonds they all have with one another. Is it a perfect family? No, of course not, but it is so much like a REAL family. Real people with real problems, but told with so much talent and flair that it is captivating from beginning to end. That is what it makes the book so wonderful.

This one is alternately heartwarming and heartbreaking as you see things through the eyes of Laine, who is simultaneously yearning for a child of her own, trying to decide whether or not to divorce her husband, and coming to terms with her mother’s declining mental state, and Sally, the matriarch of the Francis family, as she deals with the early stages of dementia.

Laine, who found that she received the most attention growing up when she was cleaning and organizing her family home, continues to find value in being useful as an adult. She persists in being a people pleaser and peacemaker and itches to clean up everyone else’s messes while struggling to balance her own needs.

This is women’s fiction with warring themes of how much of yourself you should commit to others versus what you owe yourself. There are some friends-to-lovers and second chance romance tropes thrown in.

With the way things were trending in the book and the different personalities in the story, I was a bit surprised with how neatly things wrapped up in the end.

Content warnings: divorce, parental abandonment (past), Alzheimer’s and dementia, deceased parents, affair (past), grief, familial obligations

Thank you to Lake Union Publishing and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I have read Camille Pagan’s books in the past and loved them. But I just didn’t connect with this one much and it didn’t hit home with me. It was a quick read and Camille Pagan is one of my “auto buy” authors but there was some things about this book that I just didn’t get.

Camille Pagan writes some of the most heartfelt family dramas out there today. In her newest book, Laine is dealing with possible divorce and wanting to start a family as she’s getting older. However she’s also dealing with her aging mother and her two sisters who both have their own families.

Laine takes a trip to her hometown of Brooklyn to try to gain some clarity about her marriage, but finds her mother is losing her memory and acting out in strange ways. Two of which are leaving the house in her nightgown and buying all sorts of things she doesn’t need and can’t afford. She’s also become a hoarder. Luckily Laine is a organizer by profession and can help. But she’s uncovering some secrets about her childhood and their neighbors as she’s cleaning up.

Laine also runs into her childhood best friend after they had a falling out over 16 years ago and haven’t spoken since. This part was fascinating and I loved seeing how she and Ben responded to their riff.

I really feel for Laine because she has waited to start a family for her husband to say yes and he keeps delaying. There is no perfect time to start a family and it’s hard when two people have to both be on board. I’m lucky to not have to deal with aging parents, but this part of the story was heartbreaking. I loved Laine’s sister Hadley, but I wanted to kick Piper. It really seemed like their picked sides and Piper picked Josh.

Thank you to @suzyapprovedbooktours, @kccpr, @lakeunionauthors, and @camillepagan for my gifted copy. Everything Must Go is on sale this Tuesday, 4/26!

EVERYTHING MUST GO by Camille Pagán is a poignant and emotional story of love, family, friendship and second chances. I have enjoyed all of Camille Pagán’s books and was thrilled to have the chance to read her latest. Laine Francis is a thirty-eight- year-old professional organizer living with her husband, Josh, in Ann Arbor, MI. While grieving the loss of her beloved dog, Belle, and questioning the stability of her marriage, Laine gets a troubling call from her sisters in New York that their mother, Sally, seems to be losing her memory and begging Laine to come home to help. Although she rarely returns to New York, she agrees to make a quick visit to Brooklyn. When she runs into her former best friend and neighbor, Ben, she soon learns that there is more to their long-time estrangement than she could ever have known. As long-held secrets are gradually revealed, Laine must make hard decisions about her marriage, her desire for a child, her relationship with Ben and how she can help care for her mother. The story is told from Laine’s and Sally’s points of view as they navigate their new realities. I was drawn into this compelling and sensitive story of loyalty and sacrificing for those you love, but still finding a way to be true to oneself. As with all of her books, the author has masterfully portrayed her characters and their complex relationships. I truly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing an early copy to read and review.

I really loved the premise of this book when I read the blurb. I enjoyed the depiction of what a family goes through with an elderly parent. I could feel their struggles and emotions in making decisions.

It did not end up going in the direction I thought it would and I found myself disappointed. The storyline just kind of fell flat for me. I didn’t feel any attachment to the characters, they were a bit bland for me.

Since my early twenties, stories about family, friendship, marriage, and motherhood have been my very favorite kind to read. I discovered Camille Pagán’s work back in 2018, and quickly realized that she consistently checks all of my boxes. She’s been a favorite author of mine ever since. Her novels always incorporate everything I could possibly ask for when it comes to women’s fiction. In her latest, Everything Must Go, we meet Laine Francis. Laine is stuck in a hard place at the moment. She wants to start a family, but her husband isn’t ready, and probably never will be. Her mother is showing early signs of dementia, and her sisters really need help keeping an eye on her. Laine absolutely wants to help, but one major thing stands in the way - her location. Her family is all in New York, but she is happily residing in Michigan. So, Laine has a few big decisions to make. How important is starting a family to her? Important enough to end her marriage over it? How can she help her mom and sisters when she’s miles away? Does she really want to move back to New York? I loved having a front row seat to Laine’s decision making and thought process as she grappled with which direction her life should take. You must read it to find out! Once again, Pagán nailed it with her latest gem filled with family dynamics, sisterhood, marriage difficulties, life-long friendship, and self-discovery. Also, I love that some kittens made an appearance in this novel. This truly warmed my feline-loving heart.

Fast paced story of a woman in her middle age having come to a cross-road of hard decisions. Laine is a professional organizer, and even she can’t clean up the mess that is currently her life. Her precious dog Belle just died, she is budding heads with her husband constantly because she wants a baby and he is not ready, and on top of it all received a family emergency call that her mother might have dementia.

As she returns to her family home in Brooklyn to go take care of her mom, she is met with the familiar eyes of her childhood best-friend Ben, who she hasn’t talked to since their huge fight in colleague. Head-spinning over what to do with every unfolding in her life, you as the reader will step into a story revolving around secrets, sacrifices, second-chances and finally doing something for yourself.

The premise seemed as something I would enjoy a lot, but in all honesty the book fell a bit flat for me. I liked that it had POV’s from Laine and Sally, really giving insight into their choices and behavior, and I thought the sensitive topic of Alzheimers and dealing with a family member with the illness was dealt with respectfully. The ‘threatened’ divorce didn’t seem to stir up any sort of pain for either Laine or Josh which was weird for me seeing they were married for 14 years, and Ben wanting to pick up exactly where they left of years ago felt rushed and not worked through. Ultimately just wasn’t the book for me. BUT this book might be exactly what your looking for if any of the following interest you:

🧼Second-chance romance
🧼Tight-knit family bonds
🧼Alzheimers/Dementia caregiving
🧼MC that finally choses herself

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC