All the Living

by C.E. Morgan

Book Overview

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

One of the National Book Foundation's 5 Best Writers Under 35

Finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished book of fiction

Third Place in Fiction for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award

Aloma is an orphan, raised by her aunt and uncle, educated at a mission school in the Kentucky mountains. At the start of the novel, she moves...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312429320
• ISBN13: 9780312429324
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

"We all got schooling darlin..."

I've waited a while to write anything about this novel. For me, "All the Living" is one of those rare books that turns inside your head for weeks after you've finished reading. It's an incredible work. I keep changing my opinion on whether I like Aloma and Orren. They've been thrust into an extremely difficult and adult living situation, but are still children in many ways... and often act like it. They are in the throes of that period of early adulthood where most have the room to freely explore human relationships, both sexual and platonic. Aloma and Orren do not have this luxury. Their physical environment has them tightly boxed and, as a reader, I can feel them suffocating. It's the sort of brink living situation that either forces collapse or induces a surrender to some divine authority. This is an idea that is inherent in Bell's sermons (which are astonishingly written). Morgan's use of the language is adventurous and, in several places, absolutely breathtaking. The dialogue is pitch perfect. This book has garnered some buzz in the literary world, and it deserves more. Read it.

JOYS AND SORROWS OF LIVING

ALL THE LIVING Aloma and Orren meet when he is helping deliver supplies to her school. They at once are attracted to each other and begin 'dating'. Their dates, however, consist of having a relationship in his truck, either the truck bed or the back seat. Aloma has no family to speak of. Her parents died while she was a little girl and her aunt and uncle take her into their already filled home. She begins to attend a mission school and that is where she meets Orren. Orren is a few years older and wiser than Aloma. He lives on his family farm. He is in the middle of despair; his daddy died while he was a young boy and his brother and mom recently passed in a tragic, awful accident. Orren is hell-bent on making the farm truly his and making it profitable. He does this out of being strong-willed, but also from feeling guilty and full of grief about his mom and brother. He wants to make this work to a point of obsession, but it is a hard and thankless job trying to run a tobacco farm. Aloma finishes school and moves out to the farm in the Kentucky mountains with Orren. Does she love him? She thinks so. She moves to the farm and at once feels isolated and alone, not getting much attention from Orren who is too busy trying to make the farm work and still deep in grief. He does love Aloma, but is too busy to tell/show her and down in the tunnel of grief that is so deep he can't seem to climb out. Aloma sets to fixing up the old and run-down farm house that was in Orren's family. She learns how to cook, tries to help out with the chores, and cleans until there is nothing left to clean. She is alone even with Orren is with her. She finds a job working at the church playing the piano which is her first love. There she meets the handsome preacher, Bell Johnson, who also works a farm and is single. She finds herself attracted to Bell who talks to her and pays attention to her. This book is short, only 199 pages. What you get out of this short book is so much about life, living, loss of loved ones, relationships, grief, being lonely. C.E. Morgan wrote a wonderful book and I find that I simply cannot stop thinking about this one. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this book. What a super movie this would make! This book would be great for any book clubs or discussion groups. Treat yourself to this book. You will feel the heat of the Kentucky sun, see and smell the tobacco plants growing, feel the frustration from both Orren and Aloma. Do these two stay together? Does Bell Johnson get the girl? Does Aloma stay in this half-horse town, forever lonely? Read this grand little book and find out. Thank you! Pam

"Strange that she could want to be here and at the church...yet feel that no matter where she [was]

In this assured and evocative debut novel set in rural Kentucky, author C. E. Morgan comes closer to conveying the essence of life, as she sees it, than do most other novelists with generations' more experience. Here Morgan recreates the bare bones lives of subsistence farmers who are irrevocably tied to the land, a land which is sometimes fickle in its ability to sustain those who so lovingly tend it. Orren Fenton is just out of college when he inherits the family's tobacco farm upon the deaths of his mother and brother. Three weeks after the funerals, Orren asks Aloma, his young lover, to come back to the farm with him. Aloma, an orphan from the age of three, is a pianist at the school she attended, and she sees this as her chance to begin a whole new life--a real life of her own. Aloma and Orren are very young, and the work of running the farm is brutal. Orren cannot afford the time to teach the inexperienced Aloma what she needs to know to help him, and Aloma is left to try to strip the floors, wash the walls, and try to make the old family home inhabitable. The piano there is unusable. Before long, these two inexperienced young people are at each other's throats. Aloma feels abandoned all day, while Orren feels that she does not appreciate his work. His suggestion that she practice the piano at a church in town leads to her meeting with a local preacher, Bell Johnson, a single man who is attracted to her and who represents a different way of life. Within this simple framework, Morgan explores universal themes: one's dreams for the future vs. the brutal realities of the present, new life and the hopes it represents vs. death of loved ones, the feeling that God watches over all vs. the sense that God is more interested in the land than in individuals, and the belief that self-knowledge comes from one's relationships with the outside world vs. the understanding that self-knowledge grows from within. Morgan writes with the deeply religious sense that all life is somehow connected, and that God is part of a continuum that begins with the land, the place where life begins. The three main characters here--Aloma, Orren, and Bell Johnson--are fully developed, and Morgan does not need to tell us how they feel: their reactions to what is happening to them are so fully realized that the reader knows how they feel. She excels at recreating a person's inner feelings with exactness, and her description of nature, while sometimes gorgeous, is always balanced shortly afterward with realistic images of its fragility. Frequently using nouns as verbs, she compresses images, talking about Aloma "basketing the eggs," about Bell's father agreeing " to reverend the church," and the farm's rooster "tightroping the empty crib." In the conclusion, Morgan reconciles the conflicts as well as Aloma and Orren might be expected to reconcile them, given their youth, but she leaves it up to them, and the reader, to decide whether they will find self-know

Beautifully written examination of relationships

First off, for those of you who might be confused by the plot description - this is not a romance! The plot of this slim novel is easily described but it not so simple to explain what the author has done here. The prose is beautiful, unusual and almost poetic. The author's ability to cut to the heart of relationships will hold your interest until the last page. I read this book in a day and was surprised at how few events had actually occured but at how much the characters had been through emotionally. The story, in brief, is that of orphaned Aloma who is raised by Nuns, has a relationship with Orren and returns with him to his family farm when his family is killed in a car accident. If you are expecting action or steamy romance, you will not find it here. Aloma and Orren may be living 'in sin'( and it does figure prominently in Aloma's mind as something she should be ashamed of), and there may be an 'other man' in the story, but the primary focus of the novel is not romance. Aloma's bereavement is old and one that she is long used to. When we meet her and Orren he too has been bereaved but she cannot fathom his sense of loss or his mute grief at the death of his family. Never having a place of her own she struggles with his desperate need to cling to the family farm which is withering away before them. This is a wonderfully well written book and I highly recommend it.

Astonishing, beautiful.

This timeless and beautiful story of a young man and woman eking out a life in Kentucky is one of the more moving, beautiful books I have read in the last five years. Aloma and Orren will rise up from the pages of this book for you, and you'll see them, hear them, smell them. You'll also love them. There's so much in this slim book; backbreaking work, quiet humor, music, God, the quest for identity, redemption, and through it all, the coming together of two young people, one lost in grief, one yearning to understand her place in the world. Inner and outer landscapes are described in spare, graceful, moving prose. The erotic passages are so beautiful. I've used the word beautiful too many times in this review and I really don't care. I give this book my highest recommendation possible.