All I Love and Know

Each of us get up every morning and start our day in a certain direction.  What happens in the world around has a affect on how we go through our days and our lives.  Sometimes those chain reactions are so small we are not aware of them.  Sometimes they are trivial and sometimes they change the course of our day or week.  Once in a great while they are life changing.  This book is the story of how a life changing event can reverberate through so many lives and across the world.

Author Judith Frank uses this novel to  confront so many different issues that people are confronting and thinking about everyday.  Where to even start?  On the surface this starts out as a story about two young homosexual men at the beginning of their relationship.  This would not have been a book I would have stayed with.  But as you read on you find out that there are so many other plots and dilemmas that each character is working through that the book becomes a story of people in general and how their personal lives affect each other and how the circumstances of the world around them affect them and their relationships.  So complicated!!

Daniel and Matt, two young men building a life together in Northampton Ma.  They are each personally working on not only how to live in a relationship with another person but how their sexual preferences have defined who they each are.  Daniel’s twin, Joel, a larger than life brother, who lives in Israel, married with two children and a successful television career is killed in a cafe bombing along with his wife.  The bombing in an Israeli cafe reverberates around the globe to shake up the world that Daniel and Matt are slowly working through.

As the novel develops we, as readers, are privledged to listen into the inner thoughts and perspectives of each of the main characters as they work through conflicts the new lives they will embark on present.  Daniel struggles with the feelings he has always felt of being the “invisible twin”.  Now thrust into the limelight when the will is read and he becomes the guardian of Joel’s children.  Matt, who never thought about settling down and being a parent, works through the process of accepting responsibility and wondering if he capable of really being there for someone else.
We also meet the children, Gal, seven and Noam, two.   We watch as they are brought to America and how their new world and the experiences they have been through affect their development and feelings.  We are able to listen in on Gal’s reactions, what it is like to start over in a new country without someone you feel you can confide in.

The best part of this novel that the author Judith Frank got right is the individual feelings and interpretations inside each character’s head.  I really felt like I could understand each of the characters position, their feelings, their reasoning for how they reacted to different situations.

My feeling was maybe what a therapist may feel when listening to different patients, if each of these people could really put into words and be heard by the other people involved, so many problems could be avoided or solved through conversation.  Each character is justified in their actions and feelings.  Frank gives us real insight into the feelings of survivors of terrorist attacks.  Real insight into the thoughts and feelings of the two men trying to create a family together.  Interesting insight into the thoughts around the Israeli-Palestian problem from a more personal point of view.  I think she also captures the feelings of a child who looses her parents and is starting over in a new environment trying to fit in.  The child also carries the burden of the adults around her and not wanting to upset her grandparents or new parental figures.  She carries the heaviest burden.

This is fabulous novel, so well developed.  You really understand and wish you could help the characters talk to each other and work through their problems together for a happy ending.