<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30025336-all-the-crooked-saints" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="All the Crooked Saints" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1500451773m/30025336.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30025336-all-the-crooked-saints">All the Crooked Saints</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1330292.Maggie_Stiefvater">Maggie Stiefvater</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2560683183">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
Maggie Stiefvater’s All the Crooked Saints is, pun intended, a miraculous book. It qualifies as young adult literature because it describes an emotional world centering on love, confusion, regret, and responsibilities. It also carries with it wide pallets of characters and several interlinking family dynamics. Finally, it also has multiple embedded love stories. All of these serve to not only flavor the story but the pieces on the board for the layered introspective and symbolic journey that the book takes the reader through.
The book was recommended to me by my favorite librarian, and I haven’t encountered such a pleasant read in sometime. My particular habit is to not read cover text for books and thereby allow myself to be surprised. This book was a wonderful surprise although somewhat disorienting for the first chapters. It jumps from time to time seeing some of the characters at different ages and also bringing in other characters from foreign locals as you step into the story. Each of these serves Maggie Steifvater masterful techniques: layering. This book is full of layering. This layering in turn highlights the reflection and the symbolism Stiefvater uses. The book itself has as a primary theme what Stiefvater terms “miracles.” Miracles described by the book are in fact an opportunity for visitors to undergo a two-fold transformation. First, “inner darkness” is made visible in fantastic ways. In this way individual idiosyncrasies, self-blame, etc are made visible as monsters, mutations, and credible happenings. The next stage, as makes clear the author, is not resolved immediately. The “pilgrim”, the word used for those who come seeking miracles, then has to find a way to conquer the fantastic manifestation. Failing to do so often results in the death of the pilgrim. Despite this being a generally family friendly and accessible book, there are no bones about the harsh consequences of failing in an individual’s miraculous journey. Others of the pilgrims who visit are sometimes around for years unable to resolve their issues, and as you read the book you come to love the long-benighted who are cursed by inability to resolve their first miracle.
The book features a whole swath of one (the Soria) family, and takes a few these characters as the central fixtures around whom the story revolves. I won’t spoil the ending, but the overall result of Steifvater’s masterful layering is that the story was in keeping with the entire arc that the author had created providing insight into human nature and the nature of love and repentance and faith. I was continually surprised the keen insight the author chose to shed, something not always present in young adult literature where the authors sometimes prostitute depth of observation to the goal of entertaining or watering things down for the reader. Maggie Stiefvater did not do any of these things; her only nods to her young adult audience were in making it accessable to them with the nature of the setting and the emotions discussed. Certainly a very well deserved 5-stars.
Also, regarding the audio: narrator Thom Rivera performed masterfully, capturing accents of both US and Hispanic heritage and giving a riveting, but not overwrought, reading.