Making a family

Nearly noon and I’m only just out of bed, but that’s okay because I didn’t switch the light off until 4:30 this morning and that’s okay because I was reading.

Is there really a difference between reading until 4:30am and bingeing something on some streaming service until the same hour? Yes, there is. The first involves going to bed at midnight to read for an hour or two. The latter involves remaining glued to the sofa, allowing “just one more episode” to start until the wee small hours. The thing is being in bed by midnight. (Actually, it was 11:30 last night.)

If you’re a reader you know how it sometimes goes. At one o’clock you look at the clock and think ‘oh, good, I can read for another hour before it’s properly bedtime’. (Well, bedtime for me.) Except next time you look at the clock it’s ten past three and you think ‘I really should turn out the light’, but you’re gripped by the story and you really want to know what happens next, so you decide you’ll give it another half hour. Except, when you look again, it’s been an hour and now you’re so close to the end that you just have to keep going.

And what was this novel that kept me reading until the wee small hours?

This month’s Bad Girls book, All the Children Are Home. If it kept me going until 4:30am, obviously I liked it.

Dahlia and Louie Moscatelli are foster parents. As the story begins in 1959, many, many children have received their care, but three have become fixtures: Jimmy, just entering his teens has been with them since he was two, Zaidie, about ten and her little brother Jon. Make no mistake – this is a family. Dahlia is Ma and Louie is Dad. Dahlia has been housebound for nearly three decades, traumatised by a terrible event in her teens.

Into this mix, social services delivers Agnes, a stoic six-year-old Indian (which she would have been called in 1959) girl with plenty of trauma of her own in her short life. Agnes is meant to be an emergency placement, there for a short time until a more permanent home can be found for her. After her first evening with the Moscatellis Agnes knows she’s found her family. The Moscatellis are inclined to agree. 

The story (which jumps forward several years in part two) is told from four points of view: Dahlia’s, Jimmy’s, Zaidie’s and Agnes’s. I do quite like multiple narrators. (Except on those occasions when the author annoyingly does not start each chapter with the name of the narrator and you have to figure who the hell’s point of view this is supposed to be.) And I give Francis full marks for giving each of these four characters wonderfully distinct voices of their own. 

I had only one complaint when I closed the book for the last time at 4:30 in the morning. I wanted more. So many questions (none of which I can list without giving away key plotlines) I want answered.

Oh, my. I’ve just done an internet search and discovered that Patry Francis died in 2022, the year after All the Children Are Home was published. There is no chance she will ever revisit these characters, no chance my questions could be answered. That is very sad indeed. But her other two novels are going on my To Read list.