All Saints

Callanan’s storytelling ability is on full display in this delicious little novel. As he takes us into the life of Emily Hamilton, a teacher at a Catholic high school in Southern California, we hear the character’s unique and wonderful voice, and I quickly became lost in the portrayal. The story develops with humor and sadness as Hamilton contemplates regrets and lost opportunities.Hamilton’s years of teaching has brought her to the existential questions of whether or not what she does actually makes a difference. When a student comes tells her that she’s pregnant, Hamilton does everything she can to make sure the girl gets what she needs, including an abortion, which, of course, flies in the face of the Catholic doctrine. To complicate matters, Hamilton becomes involved sexually with another student, who also has an interest in the pregnant teen.I thoroughly enjoyed this book. However, I can’t give it 5 stars for what may be a personal problem of mine. I expect first person narratives to shed insight into the main character. Unfortunately, after I finished this story, I didn’t feel that I’d learned much about Emily’s motivations. I know the mantra is show, don’t tell, but I really needed to know more about why a 50 year old teacher would sleep with a 17 year old student. Or why she thought the attentions of a priest and friend were unacceptable. These interactions are at the core of the story, and I’m not sure, after reading the whole novel, what drove her to do what she did.

This is a very well written book - the author has an excellent ability to make clever plays on words, and he also possesses a very strong vocabulary. But it is not quite what I had expected based on the reviews on the back of the book. A great deal of the story centers on the woman's internal dialogue in her mind about her thoughts, feelings and beliefs regarding past and current experiences. Still, the story is interesting and thought-provoking, and has many references to Catholicism. So if you have not much exposure to Catholicism, you will undoubtedly not understand most of the references to this religion [as was the case for me].

I am a retired Catholic high school teacher (English and Moral Decisions - not the same course)...and I identified completely with her...at first....then she started jumping around in different stages of her life with different people and...well....I just couldn't keep up.I guess that's why I retired.

loved "The Cloud Atlas" (which I accidentally purchased when trying to buy the 'other' Cloud Atlas - and glad I did!) so wanted to see his next book. Totally different and took me a bit to get used to the rambling first-person narrative, but once I settled in, I could barely put the book down. Engrossing, funny, crazy, human. Really loved it.

I absolutely loved this book. From the intelligent and nuanced take on Catholicism (no cartoon nuns and priests here) to the complexity of the characters, this book is an original. It is somewhat rare for male authors to attempt a female protagonist told in the first person (and a middle aged one at that), but far rarer for one to succeed as well as the author does here.

The Author had previously written an unusal well-crafted novel, The Cloud Atlas. He follows this up whith All Saints equally well-written and intriguing. I marveled at how a young man could portray a 50 year old woman with such depth and compassion and make you believe that she was speaking. I look forward to future books by this author,I intended a rating of Four stars and don't know how it wound up as only one. I haven't been able to correct the rating.

This novel is a severely flawed effort. Its principal limitation is in its narrating central character, the tiresome, thrice divorced, fifty-year old Emily Hamilton, a religious history teacher at an O.C. Catholic prep school. Actually, though unwittingly, infantalized by her own world view, Hamilton emerges (with her author's apparent approval) as a female version of, say, Peter Pan, a woman determined to remain a kooky kid forever. As a fictional character, nevertheless, she is such a limited, repetitive, frankly boring "vessel of consciousness" throughout the novel's roughly 300 pages that she makes Emma Bovary seem an intellectual heavyweight. Unfortunately, author Callanan offers no profounder perspective on experience, whether by irony or through implication, to counterbalance the limitations of his guilt-ridden, largely self-absorbed, endlessly babbling heroine. At her worst, she is particularly fond of advancing a species of sophistic spiritual democracy, hence the title "All Saints." What this involves for her is an insistence on our all being human, all too human, and therefore all needing and deserving, in any scrape, unlimited "compassion." By "compassion" she and the author, I assume, mean nothing higher or finer than a sentimental complicity with human failure, merely because it is human failure. What is ignored is that this is a "compassion" which comes at far too cheap a price.Equally troublesome is the author's preference for inverting the familiar admonition of writing classes. He prefers telling rather than showing. Consequently, too much is narrated, too little dramatized. Further, the point of what is dramatized is often underdeveloped or unclear, if not actually opaque. At the same time, the framing of the chopped-up action is so amateur that the supposed surprises in the novel's closing chapters are easily predictable.Emily Hamilton, an unlikely and unconvincing amalgam of femme fatale and scholar with a graduate degree in church history, is said to be very conversant with religious writing and the lives of old saints. One wishes, though, before she began dispensing her blanket "compassion" for all us modern saints, that she (and perhaps her author as well) had read a little Kierkegaard as preparation, wrestling with the contemporary mindset he called "the despair which knows not it is despair."