2015 Rainbow Awards Honorable Mention: All We Lack by Sandra Moran

[reviews_and_ramblings]

All We Lack by Sandra Moran
Lesbian Contemporary General Fiction
Paperback: 252 pages
Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing Company (March 24, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1939562929
ISBN-13: 978-1939562920
Amazon: All We Lack
Amazon Kindle: All We Lack

It begins with a bus crash. Maggie is a funeral director from Indiana who lives a double life. Bug is a ten-year-old boy in the Pennsylvania foster care system who is sent to live with an aunt he doesn't know. Jimmy is a former paramedic and prescription drug addict on his way to meet a woman he met online who thinks he's a successful doctor. Helen is a Chicago insurance investigator who is leaving her marriage in search of the woman she wants to be. Four strangers, all traveling to Boston in search of better lives, are tied together in ways they don't even realize. Each are trying to fill the void of what's missing in their lives. Sometimes it takes a tragedy to overcome all that we lack.


Destined to be a classic - this novel should win the Lambda award for General Fiction, it's epitome of lesbian literature.

All We Lack grabs you from the first moment of the prologue.  The prologue begins with the bus crash, tossing the reader around in slow-motion, describing every terrifying and heart-breaking detail, as the bus tumbles.  Unbeknownst to the reader, we are also meeting the characters in the story, but without the heavy-handed foreshadowing that I saw in so many of the books. From there, the story built organically by exploring what was going on before the crash in the lives of the individuals we first glimpsed as they were tossed around the tumbling bus.  The characters' stories were developed in stages, moving through each of them, though not in a predictable order like Maggie, Bug, Jimmy, Helen.  The author skipped around a bit, bringing Maggie in more often, as her's was the main story, but it gave the book a feeling of developing organically. Each character was a fully fleshed out person, with qualities you like and ones you don't, not easy to achieve, because as an author, there are some characters that you fall in love with and want to make all good, and others you really don't like who you want to under-bake.  The settings were very visual to me, I could see much of went on clearly, without the author going into minutiae.  I get bored easily with detail, and this was the right amount. And the style of writing kept pulling me through the story.  I kept wondering what was coming next.  I generally don't have trouble putting a book down when I need to do something else, but this one I did.  I actually spent an entire afternoon and evening until the wee hours with it because I didn't want to put it down.  Normally I space out my reading into 2-3 hours a day, but not with All We Lack.

Wonderfully rich and compelling.