• All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

  • By: Janelle Brown
  • Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
  • Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
  • 4.0 out of 5 stars (26 ratings)

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All We Ever Wanted Was Everything  By  cover art

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

By: Janelle Brown
Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
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Publisher's summary

A smart, comic pause-resister about a Silicon Valley family in free fall over the course of one eventful summer from the author of Watch Me Disappear and Pretty Things.

When Paul Miller’s pharmaceutical company goes public, making his family IPO millionaires, his wife, Janice, is sure this is the windfall she’s been waiting years for - until she learns, via messengered letter, that her husband is divorcing her (for her tennis partner!) and cutting her out of the new fortune.

Meanwhile, 400 miles south in Los Angeles, the Millers’ older daughter, Margaret, has been dumped by her newly famous actor boyfriend and left in the lurch by an investor who promised to revive her fledgling post-feminist magazine, Snatch.

Sliding toward bankruptcy and dogged by creditors, she flees for home where her younger sister Lizzie, 14, is struggling with problems of her own.

Formerly chubby, Lizzie has been enjoying her newfound popularity until some bathroom graffiti alerts her to the fact that she’s become the school slut.

The three Miller women retreat behind the walls of their Georgian colonial to wage battle with divorce lawyers, debt collectors, drug-dealing pool boys, mean girls, country club ladies, evangelical neighbors, their own demons, and each other, and in the process they become achingly sympathetic characters we can’t help but root for, even as the world they live in epitomizes everything wrong with the American Dream.

Exhilarating, addictive, and superbly accomplished, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything crackles with energy and intelligence and marks the debut of a knowing and very funny novelist, wise beyond her years.

©2008 Janelle Brown (P)2008 Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Brown's winning debut teaches a hopeful truth: Sometimes, just as you're starting to drown, things fall back into place." ( People)
"Janelle Brown expertly takes the social temperature of those gated communities exclusive to new money and finds a chill that inhabits the growth of family life...[a] beauty of a book." ( New York Daily News)

What listeners say about All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

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Not my favorite

This book kept coming up again and again on Audible's website so I finally decided to give it a try, but for me it was just OK. It was fine to pass the time by, but not a page turner by any means.

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Do not recommend

Didn't keep my attention at all. By the end I don't really know what the story was about. will be returning

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2 people found this helpful