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A review by momadvice
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown
3.0
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything is a Silicon Valley satire that takes a glimpse into one family’s life and showcases how the threads began to unravel when they discover that money really is not the key to happiness.
Janice is a relatively happy trophy wife who has helped her husband in every way that she knows how to be the roaring success that he is. She reads her Gourmet magazine and replicates the dishes, she is carefully groomed and has maintained her figure over the years, and her family lives in the immaculately tidy home of their dreams.
When her husband’s stocks soar, after making an important pharmaceutical drug, she runs out to grab the ingredients for the most perfect celebration dinner. When she arrives at home, she finds a note from her husband letting her know that he is leaving her for her best friend and that he will be filing for a divorce.
What happens to a woman when her whole career and existence are based upon caring for her husband? Janice quickly spirals out of control and the reader is taken through Janice’s downward spiral and the downward spiral of her two children who are both trying to find themselves after making bad decisions.
One daughter who grew up the valedictorian in her graduating class, now is deeply in debt after her the feminist magazine she started failed to bring in any profits. The other daughter has a desire to be liked by her peers and begins sleeping with her classmates to garner attention and her feelings of self-worth. She later decides that Jesus might be the key to her salvation, but her poor choices have taken her so far off path that you are unclear where her life will really end up. Janice, meanwhile, has decided to take crystal meth because she feels happier and more in control when she is drugged. With their mother drugged out and the two children both choosing their own destructive paths, the reader can only hope that the resolution will be filled with deep discovery and a realization that they have each other and money is not everything. It just did not end the way that the reader might hope.
I found the book to be a fun and impressive premise of self-discovery when each of the characters are trying to find who they are without their fortune, but the book was depressingly dark and never went anywhere other than the dark and dreariness that it began with. If you are into dark satires though that is filled with a little bit of dreary, this just might be the ticket for you!
Janice is a relatively happy trophy wife who has helped her husband in every way that she knows how to be the roaring success that he is. She reads her Gourmet magazine and replicates the dishes, she is carefully groomed and has maintained her figure over the years, and her family lives in the immaculately tidy home of their dreams.
When her husband’s stocks soar, after making an important pharmaceutical drug, she runs out to grab the ingredients for the most perfect celebration dinner. When she arrives at home, she finds a note from her husband letting her know that he is leaving her for her best friend and that he will be filing for a divorce.
What happens to a woman when her whole career and existence are based upon caring for her husband? Janice quickly spirals out of control and the reader is taken through Janice’s downward spiral and the downward spiral of her two children who are both trying to find themselves after making bad decisions.
One daughter who grew up the valedictorian in her graduating class, now is deeply in debt after her the feminist magazine she started failed to bring in any profits. The other daughter has a desire to be liked by her peers and begins sleeping with her classmates to garner attention and her feelings of self-worth. She later decides that Jesus might be the key to her salvation, but her poor choices have taken her so far off path that you are unclear where her life will really end up. Janice, meanwhile, has decided to take crystal meth because she feels happier and more in control when she is drugged. With their mother drugged out and the two children both choosing their own destructive paths, the reader can only hope that the resolution will be filled with deep discovery and a realization that they have each other and money is not everything. It just did not end the way that the reader might hope.
I found the book to be a fun and impressive premise of self-discovery when each of the characters are trying to find who they are without their fortune, but the book was depressingly dark and never went anywhere other than the dark and dreariness that it began with. If you are into dark satires though that is filled with a little bit of dreary, this just might be the ticket for you!