A New Book to Love: All the Children Are Home by Patry Francis #giveaway

Book Review

A sweeping saga in the vein of Ask Again, Yes following a foster family through almost a decade of dazzling triumph and wrenching heartbreak—from the author of The Orphans at Race Point.

Patry Francis has been one of my favorite authors from my lucky discovery of her first novel, The Liar’s Diary, which should have gone the way of Gone Girl but didn’t get enough attention in the right places, way back in 2007. (It’s out of print and hard to find now.) Patry’s second book, The Orphans of Race Point, came out in 2014, and now we have All the Children Are Home in 2021. Patry’s novels only seem to come out every seven years. But they’re always worth the wait!

All the Children Are Home is the story of the Moscatelli family. They are a foster family, but think of themselves as a family, period. A permanent family of five – Dahlia and Louie, the parents, two boys, and a girl. Five is good. Five is just right. When six-year-old Agnes is placed with the Moscatellis under emergency circumstances, it is meant to be temporary, but Agnes has other ideas.

The Moscatellis are outsiders in their neighborhood – not because they are a foster family, but because they go by their hearts and not by what the neighbors might think. The family looks dysfunctional and kind of weird from the outside. Each of them has painful memories from the past they can’t or won’t face.

Louie’s mother visits, bearing lasagna, to tidy the house and harangue Dahlia without much effect. Somehow, though – all together – the family works.

But children grow up. The outside world intrudes. Agnes’ arrival at the Moscatelli home is just the beginning. As the Moscatelli children grow up, the whole family struggles to weather painful changes within the family and stay afloat on the waves of societal change at the same time.

Unsparingly unsentimental, All the Children Are Home is the story of an imperfect, working-class family doing the best they can, supporting each other through adversity – trying to heal each other and themselves in the process. If you’re looking for a family novel with complex characters and emotional depth to dive into this summer, look no further than All the Children Are Home!

A Massachusetts resident, Patry Francis spoke last month at a virtual author event hosted by Avon (CT) Free Public Library. She described All the Children Are Home as “the novel of my heart,” saying she “wrote in circles” around the story for four years, trying to figure out how to tell it. The Orphans of Race Point was a love story, and so is the the story of a couple’s long marriage in All the Children Are Home: “Dahlia and Louie are another kind of love story.”

Patry Francis grew up in a working-class neighborhood of a small city similar to the one she places the Moscatelli family in. From a very young age she wanted to write – penning a novel (“Season of Sadness”) in high school instead of doing her homework.

She wrote her whole life, she said, but didn’t publish her first novel until the age of 55. So, Patry’s advice to wannabe writers is “just keep going!”

Blogaversary Giveaway

To celebrate 12 years of keeping this book blog going, I’m offering a giveaway of All the Children Are Home. Please visit the Giveaways page to enter. Open to U.S. residents only.

Thank you to author Patry Francis for providing this giveaway copy. (I already had my own copy. Not making the mistake I made with The Liar’s Diary again – reading it from the library!)