Reviews for Tell Me Everything

The average rating for Tell Me Everything based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-22 00:00:00 Benedek Nemeth Carolyn Coman has a writing style uniquely her own, every sentence filled with subtle yet impossible to forget beauty. Her stories are often marked by fairly long passages that unfold without spoken dialogue, relying at those times mainly on the internal battles of her young main protagonists to forward the plot and provide us with the information we will need about what happened before the book's beginning. This is the highly personal way in which we come to know twelve-year-old Roz, a girl still under heavy emotional distress several months after the accidental death of her mother, despite the outward affect of quiet content that she presents to most of the world. The passing away of someone as important as her mother is, to Roz, a concept too big for her to handle all at once. Such a sad happening results in so many levels of loss that it's hard for anyone to come to grips with everything it really means, but Roz is a much more innocent girl than usual for her age, and she hasn't been very successful at all in processing the full reality of her mother's death. The accident that claimed her mother's life came as the end result of a set of odd circumstances that for most people never would have existed in the first place: Roz's mother had heard about a teenage hiker lost alone in the mountains, and headed off on her own to try to save him. While trying to track down the missing youth she fell to her death, and with her exit from our mortal plane tore open a hole in her daughter's life from which Roz hasn't really even begun to recover. What was it that made a mother, living alone with her young daughter as the only legal guardian the girl had, attempt a dangerous rescue on behalf of a boy she didn't even know? Clues to the reasons behind the untimely death are sprinkled throughout the book. Roz's mother had some seriously traumatic events shape the course of her life, and one of these scarring occurrences in particular shook her mental stability. It's hard to know exactly how extensively her hold on reality had been rattled, but her bearings were clearly at least somewhat askew, and Roz was discomfited at times by some of the effects that her mother's dubious ways indirectly had on her. Nothing could have harmed her as badly as losing her mother, though. In the aftermath of the accident, Roz has gone to live with her Uncle Mike, her mother's brother. Uncle Mike has his own way of living, but he does everything in his power to help Roz cope with the shock of her mother's death. When it comes down to it, though, there's not really a lot that he can do for Roz. She's still having a hard time comprehending the loss that she has suffered and figuring out what should happen next, and she is further confused by some of the half-baked "realizations" that her mother had imparted to her about forgiveness, trusting God, and learning to move forward against the constant challenges of one's own most enduring source of pain. Roz wants nothing more than to come to terms with the accident, and for her doing so to be in a way that honors the beliefs and attitude of her mother. How is she supposed to do that, though, when the one person who could have guided her through the puzzling darkness is gone forever? Roz can't just stand still and hope for enlightenment to reach her as it apparently did for her mother. There's a deeper reality and a more complete story out there to be known, she believes, and she's willing to sacrifice anything to earn it. So Roz embarks on a tense, uneasy journey to find the answers she seeks, courageously following the example of the mother she loves so dearly and never wanted to see go away. Tell Me Everything is a remarkably realistic novel. Carolyn Coman doesn't cheat her readers out of the complete impact of a good story by letting quick fixes or hackneyed character types seep into the manuscript. She writes with the urgency of deeply understood sadness and the throbbing rhythm of expectant hope, and the emotion as shown is so fresh and honest that it attracts us to the people in the narrative and brings us to invest in the outcome of their situation as if we, ourselves, were actually a part of their experiences. For such a short book, Tell Me Everything gives a lot of story and a lot of truth as it presents a piece of one family's life, unadorned by fancy platitudes or easy wisdom standing at the ready to explain the hard parts about our world. Yet somehow, the story ultimately remains one of hope for the future; hope that a devastating loss need not be the absolute end when we still have people in our lives who are willing and able to keep us afloat if we give them the chance. It's a powerful message, made all the more believable by the story's lack of pat sentiment or too-easy conclusion. I always find good reason to recommend the work of Carolyn Coman, and Tell Me Everything is no exception.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-24 00:00:00 Alexander Jankowsky Coman is the Newbery award winning author of What Jamie Saw. While I was impressed with her previous work, Tell Me Everything is one to be skipped, before you chuck it against the wall. It is a disjointed, poorly written, rambling, non sensical tale of a young woman who lost her mother when she rescued a young man on a mountain. From begging - end this book was frustrating. The author tried to dump platitudes of religion, finding meaning in pain....but truly, nothing rang true at all. I think I'll call this one the worst read of 2012.