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All the Names I Know
It’s 1976, and the Farnan family is unraveling.
After one sister dies and another takes off in the middle of the night, fourteen-year-old MK Farnan is left to search her small Connecticut beach town while trying to make peace with her grieving mother. All the Names I Know is a tale about the bonds between women, the weight of guilt and mental illness, and the power of storytelling.
Readers are calling it “elegant,” “well-observed and evocatively written,” filled with “exquisitely realized characters.” "Reminded me of Kate Atkinson's best."
After one sister dies and another takes off in the middle of the night, fourteen-year-old MK Farnan is left to search her small Connecticut beach town while trying to make peace with her grieving mother. All the Names I Know is a tale about the bonds between women, the weight of guilt and mental illness, and the power of storytelling.
Readers are calling it “elegant,” “well-observed and evocatively written,” filled with “exquisitely realized characters.” "Reminded me of Kate Atkinson's best."
255 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 22, 2024
69 people are currently reading
29 people want to read
About the author
L.S. Waxman
1 bookL. S. Waxman teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She grew up in a small town in coastal Connecticut but now lives near the Pitt campus with her husband and two dogs in a hundred-year-old house, where she continues to long for the ocean.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 27, 2024
A vividly observed and reflective growing-up story
The story unfolds through the voices of 10 characters, almost all of whom are in some way troubled or troubling, but centers on MK, a keenly observant and preternaturally self-sufficient girl of fourteen. Despite all the losses around her in her family and community - losses of physical health, mental health, drug dealing, housing insecurity, and a town in decline - throughout, you know, as her mother expresses at the close of the novel, that MK is going to be alright. She develops from an imaginative oral storyteller whose tales remake her world with more joy and better endings, into an exploring reader finding a whole world of ideas in the public high school 10th grade reading list (without a teacher's guidance, since she attends an inferior Catholic school) and ultimately into a beginning writer.
Time and place are vividly described- the freedom/neglect of growing up in the 1970s wandering until you came home hungry, the fabric of the fading coastal town with its small market shops and second hand store and neighbors who know each others full histories.
Well-observed and evocatively written .
The story unfolds through the voices of 10 characters, almost all of whom are in some way troubled or troubling, but centers on MK, a keenly observant and preternaturally self-sufficient girl of fourteen. Despite all the losses around her in her family and community - losses of physical health, mental health, drug dealing, housing insecurity, and a town in decline - throughout, you know, as her mother expresses at the close of the novel, that MK is going to be alright. She develops from an imaginative oral storyteller whose tales remake her world with more joy and better endings, into an exploring reader finding a whole world of ideas in the public high school 10th grade reading list (without a teacher's guidance, since she attends an inferior Catholic school) and ultimately into a beginning writer.
Time and place are vividly described- the freedom/neglect of growing up in the 1970s wandering until you came home hungry, the fabric of the fading coastal town with its small market shops and second hand store and neighbors who know each others full histories.
Well-observed and evocatively written .
January 26, 2026
A strange collection of people
It seemed to take forever for the story to develop & come around. I wasn't sure who I was supposed to keep track of & there was such a mixture of characters that it wasn't an enjoyable read. Only finished it to see how it would end.
It seemed to take forever for the story to develop & come around. I wasn't sure who I was supposed to keep track of & there was such a mixture of characters that it wasn't an enjoyable read. Only finished it to see how it would end.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews