Book Review: No One Is Here Except All of Us
No One Is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s description:
In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future.
I had to use the publisher’s description of No One Is Here Except All Of Us because it was such an unusual book; I was having a hard time summarizing it in my own words. It took me a while to get used to the style in which this book is written. The story is told in the style of a fable or folktale. Things happen that aren’t entirely realistic and people speak in stilted, simple sentences. Once I accepted this book for what it was, I really enjoyed it. The prose is wonderful and descriptive – heartbreaking at times and dryly funny in some places. Once I got used to the style, I found the flow of words almost relaxing in a way. Even though some terrible things happened, it was presented in a calm manner. It’s so hard for me to explain. You’ll have to read it for yourself and let me know if you felt the same way. I highly recommend that you do!
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(I received this book courtesy of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.)
