All the Numbers Book

“How much do you love me?” Daniel asked his mother.
“I love you all the numbers.”

What begins as a sunny August afternoon on a bucolic lake turns into a tragedy when a Jet Ski swerves fatally close to shore. It’s a day Ellen Banks could never have prepared for, a day no mother should ever have to live through.

The moment her son James is killed, Ellen must face the unimaginable while trying to remain strong for her older son, Daniel, who witnessed the fateful accident and blames himself. Ellen’s shock and grief soon give way to defiance as lawyers and policemen who once vowed to support Ellen’s desire for justice succumb to political pressure and back away. Still, Ellen is determined to see the reckless young man pay for his crime and to heal her family’s deep wounds. But first she must heal herself.

An unforgettable journey of power and emotion, All the Numbers poignantly depicts a woman’s reckoning with her own vulnerability and finding in the wisdom of motherhood the redemptive grace to begin again.

Publishers Weekly

Larsen's maudlin debut traces a year in the life of Ellen Banks, a divorced mother of two whose 11-year-old son, James, gets mowed down by a Jet Ski during the family's annual summer vacation. The novel's best scenes come early and are alive with detail-in the hospital, at the funeral, Ellen walking the dog in the snow with Danny, her surviving son. But after she buries James, the novel loses focus. Ellen throws herself into the case against the Jet Ski pilot, at which point the narrative adopts the mood of an overly sentimental, made-for-TV legal procedural. Larsen throws in a couple of surprises in the book's second half-Ellen arranges an ill-advised talk with the press and coincidentally runs into the jet-skier's mother at a coffee shop-but the case's outcome is never in doubt. There are bright moments, but the book feels like a novella stretched too thin. (Aug.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.