All We Know of Love

June 23, 2008
In her first YA novel, Baskin's (The Truth About My Bat Mitzvah
) portrait of a teen questioning the meaning of love is as candid and alluring as her books for middle-grade readers. High-school sophomore Natalie Gordon embarks on a journey to find her mother, who abandoned her and her father more than four years ago. During her bus ride from Connecticut to Florida, Natalie recalls incidents from her childhood leading up to her mother's departure and mulls over her tumultuous relationship with an older boy, as well as her concern that she may be pregnant. Natalie meets a few people along the way—an elderly knitter, a mild-mannered hotel manager—and Baskin captures her protagonist's subtle progression from ignoring these people to opening up to some of them; vignettes about the strangers' lives drive home the universal need to be loved. These brief glimpses might leave some readers yearning to know more about these characters but, as Natalie realizes, even minor connections are what are important in life: “Even the temporary, even the transient, even the people who you are never going to see again but who exist because we need them to, because we are human.” Ages 14–up.

September 1, 2008
Gr 7 Up-Natalie's mother left in mid-sentence. At least that is what Natalie remembers. Now four years, four months, and fifteen days later, the 16-year-old is traveling on a bus from Connecticut to Florida to ask her mother exactly what she had meant to say. The teen remembers that it was something about love, and, in her present predicament, she really needs to know. She is in a one-sided obsessive relationship with Adam, with whom she experiences her "ultimate passage into womanhood"; she has alienated her best friend; and her father thinks that she has gone skiing in Vermont. During the trip, Natalie encounters a variety of people with whom she briefly interacts, but who leave an impression on her. Their stories are inserted into the narrative as cameos, and she comes to understand that she can be loved for who she isand not because she was a girl whose mother did not love her enough to stay. A moving coming-of-age story."Sharon Morrison, Southeastern Oklahoma State University, Durant, OK"

Copyright 2008 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2008
Grades 7-10 Four years ago, Natalie Gordons mother ran off, abandoning her child. Now a high-school sophomore, Natalie decides to follow in her footsteps and run away as well. She is running away from a toxic love, from a possible pregnancy, and, finally, to hopefully find her mother and discover the reason behind her disappearance. As she rolls along I-95 on a Greyhound bus, Natalie meets others whorecount their own stories of love and loss, gradually preparing her for her mothers saga of depression andpoor choices, which leadsher to acceptance of her own plight. This sad but ultimately satisfying journey is well written and interspersed with familiar quotations about love. The simple lesson that Natalie begins to learn from her seatmates and finally grasps from her motherthat she must love herself first, before anyone else can love her backis a lesson for all readers to absorb and understand. It is, after all, all we know of love. . . .(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)