Book Review: All That We Carried

At least once a month, I will try to post a book review. Sometimes it will be a book I read years ago, other times I will have just turned the last page and feel like writing a review. 

My reviews will always be about a book I rated with either 4 or 5 stars on Goodreads and/or BookBub and/or Amazon. There are soooo many books available for readers to choose from—and to choose to buy—that I want to save you readers both selection time and hard-earned money. I want to give you “the best bang for your buck.” So, even though there are some 3-star books that are still “good,” I’ll only post reviews about the “better” and “best” books I’ve read.

Goodreads’ Rating System:                Amazon’s Rating system:                    BookBub’s Rating System:

3 stars = I liked it                                3 stars = It’s okay                                3 stars = Okay

4 stars = I really liked it                      4 stars = I like it                                  4 stars = Good

5 stars = It was amazing                      5 stars = I love it                                 5 stars = Excellent

**** 4 Stars ****

Book Summary

Ten years ago, sisters Olivia and Melanie Greene were on a backcountry hiking trip when their parents were in a fatal car accident. Over the years, they grew apart, each coping with the loss in her own way. Olivia plunged herself into law school, work, and a materialist view of the world–what you see is what you get, and that’s all you get. Melanie dropped out of college and developed an online life-coaching business around her cafeteria-style spirituality–a little of this, a little of that, whatever makes you happy.

Now, at Melanie’s insistence (and against Olivia’s better judgment), they are embarking on a hike in the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In this remote wilderness they’ll face their deepest fears, question their most dearly held beliefs, and begin to see that perhaps the best way to move forward is the one way they had never considered.

My Thoughts

Read all the way to the very end of this 362-page book! I promise it will be worth it! Don’t stop half-way like I almost did.

I have so many books on my TBR list, that in recent years, if a novel isn’t “doing it” for me by the time I get about a third of the way through it, then I’ll read only about two more chapters before calling it quits – if there isn’t a sudden spike in my interest level. That’s on “regular” novels though – ones I’m not required to do a review on because the publisher sent it to me for free to give an honest review. For this publisher (Revell), we reviewers are not required to finish the novel, but I just feel I need to finish a book if I’m going to write a review on it.

So! That is what I did for All That We Carried – and boy, did author Erin Bartels change my mind! The further I read, the more I thought, “Oh, this book is good. This book is really good!” One reason for this is Bartels threw in a little twist, a little surprise, a little something that I felt really added to the conflict and depth of the story. This piece of information (which I’m not going to hint what it is, as that would be a “spoiler”) I wish would have been included earlier in the novel though, as it would have made the book all the more enjoyable for me, and I think it would prevent any other readers from wanting to not make it to the finish line.

The description of setting throughout the entire novel is excellent; it’s very easy to clearly picture the different aspects of the outdoors and the various problems hikers might face as the sisters make their way through the mountains. My family used to do a lot of tent camping when my kids were younger, so I could identify with some of the situations the sisters had with that in this book. It’s important to me when I read a novel that contains activities I’ve done in real-life, that those activities are portrayed accurately on the page. It’s stated under the “Author’s Note” section in the back of the book that Bartels and her sister have done quite a bit of backcountry hiking, starting in June of 2012, and this familiarity is evident in the author’s vivid scenery depiction.

I don’t have a sister, but I was raised with two older brothers and the three of us all had very different personality types, and from an early age I always felt I was the most responsible and mature out of us siblings. So, I nodded my head in agreement several times about the truthfulness of how the sisters reacted when reading about the dissimilarity between “more dependable” and “serious” lawyer sister Olivia, and younger “care-free” blogger sister Melanie. (It’s nobody’s fault but your own if your clothes get wet when you fall in the river because you failed to put them in Ziploc bags like your sister told you to do! I would totally be feeling this way like Olivia was in the novel!)

Although both my parents are still alive, there have been several of my close family members die in the last ten years. I’ve discovered people react in extremely varied ways when dealing with death, and a person should never think there is a “correct way” to cope with the loss of a loved one. The sisters in this novel both struggle with this issue, each thinking to themselves and / or asking each other and other characters in the book, very real questions about how did it work out for them reacting the way they did to their folks’ death? And now that ten years have passed, do the sisters still have any problems with how they personally handled things – or with how their sibling processed things?

Like I said earlier, I wasn’t sure at first about the “likability factor” of All That We Carried, but by the end of the book, I definitely felt this novel deserved four stars. I also will check out other novels that Bartels penned.

Note: I received an Advanced Reader’s Copy (ARC) of this novel for being a part of Revell Read’s Blogger Program. I was not required to write a positive review, and all opinions expressed are my own.