What holds this novel together, stops it from becoming saturated with sorrow, is a wit so sharp it hurts to laugh at certain scenes. All My Puny Sorrows is based on the author’s own experience of her sister’s suicide, in 2010, 12 years after their father killed himself, explaining the novel’s urgency and rawness. It is with a “loving attention to every detail” that their father built their house a quality also governing this novel, written by someone who knows what happens when things fall apart. “We spent the whole time, it seemed, setting everything up and then tearing it down,” says Yoli. In the summer when the family “had a few days to kill” before they could move into their new house, they go camping in the “badlands of South Dakota”. The sisters’ father had built the house himself when he and his wife were “a newly married Mennonite couple”. “Our house was taken away on the back of a truck one afternoon late in the summer of 1979,” begins Yoli, the narrator.
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