What we all long for dionne brand ebook

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But the effect is cheap and tawdry, and it undermines what little good will her socially-conscious politics had otherwise incurred. And then, of course, we never get to learn about the aftermath. Good book? Bad book? What We All Long For is well-intentioned, I suppose, a brilliant attempt that falls short of the mark.

So I wish I could have given What We All Long For the praise it seems to have earned from everywhere else … alas, its provenance does not excuse its flaws, which are too numerous to ignore. View all 7 comments. Jan 30, BrokenTune rated it liked it Shelves: canada , reviewed. I found it on a reading list recommending contemporary Canadian fiction - and while it is fairly contemporary , at least compared to some of my other reads, and it is certainly Canadian, I am not sure why it received a lot of praise and recommendations.

Some of the writing was beautiful and quite poetic, but I could not stand any of the main characters, who were a group of not-quite grown up early-twenty-somethings who all left their families to live in a shared 2.

Some of the writing was beautiful and quite poetic, but I could not stand any of the main characters, who were a group of not-quite grown up early-twenty-somethings who all left their families to live in a shared house. I could understand some of their issues, I could even relate to some of them - after all I was an early-twenty-something in - but most of the time I just wanted to tell them to grow up. As for the other characters, the parents, the siblings, the friends, I'm not criticising the book for that.

I get that this is part of the book's message - that "we all long for something" as the title implies - but does every scene in the book have to be so dour? Is it not quite cliche enough for a Canadian literary novel to mention all sort of Toronto street names?

Does it also have to be really slow-paced? Don't get me wrong, there were some interesting aspects in the book, too, like what it means to grow up in a minority community or try and live on the fringes of society or what it is like to be a refugee or immigrant, but those aspects were not developed enough to make the book work for me. Jul 27, L rated it it was ok.

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. All I can say is this was highly disappointing and a case where I should've listened to the reviews. However, Tuyen's attention to Carla got pretty creepy at times. It isn't rape level, but it was creepy and made me really uncomfortable to read Tuyen's parts when her original pining had been so lyrically written in the first chapters. Otherwise, the 'ending' was very disappointing.

I'm not against open endings, but nothing was answered. Did Quy die? Did Oku finally move on with his life and get over Jackie? Did Tuyen move on from Carla and how did her art go? Did Carla finally move on with her life? We never find out. It just ends, like the author got bored and quit there. All we know is Jamal should've stayed in jail, and Carla drinks coffee and thinks about going back to her apartment with Tuyen working on her sculpture?

In the end, it left a bitter taste in my mouth that I had cared about these characters, read on about them and the author was so careless with them and just left all their stories untold.

It could've been so much more. Feb 23, Emily Koenig rated it it was ok. Highly overrated. Serious lack of character development left me cold. May 16, Deanna rated it it was ok Shelves: I hate when a book ends and I want to throw it across the room. This book claims to be about a boy named "Quy" who was lost when his family was escaping Vietnam. It is 30ish years later in Toronto and, as the back cover states, " And then, get this, the book ENDS with said violent, unexpected encounter, and I, as the reader, actually have no idea how this alters the lives of the people I spent over pages reading about.

The book wasn't bad, it was actually kind of interesting, but most of it is about Quy's younger sister who was born after the family minus Quy made it to Canada and her three friends. And then, nothing The four characters whose lives are followed throughout, who matter to the reader, suddenly don't matter at all. It's kind of like "Follow these four young people as they try to navigate life They have troubles, things are hard Care about them Wait a minute, Quy is home!

Oh crap this bad thing happened. The End. That's the book. Jul 16, Moktoklee added it. I felt there was a lot that I could have connected with in a few of the characters but I was prevented from doing so by my hatred of them. Linda or Martha or whatever her name was was a bike messenger and for a while near the beginning I wanted to bike through the streets of Toronto with her.

But by the end, I hated her as much as the other characters. Was I supposed to feel pity for them? Jul 06, Steph LaPlante rated it it was ok. I am not entirely sure how I felt about this novel.

I felt that there was little to now character development. There was no flow to the story at all, almost felt as though there was no purpose to the story? There was also no conclusion, it left me feeling kind of empty. Each characters story was very sad and very different from my own reality making me want to read more and learn more, but I somehow felt no emotional connection to this book.

I am very interested to hear others opinions on this n I am not entirely sure how I felt about this novel. I am very interested to hear others opinions on this novel.

What I liked: the gorgeous prose, the visceral sense of Toronto the city, the vivid depictions of Tuyen's art installations, the descriptions of the black dance clubs of Toronto in the 60s and 70s. What I didn't like: the pacing, the contrived 'coincidence' of the ending when two plot lines converged. And the book also made me wonder: most of the parents of the twenty somethings the book follows moved to Toronto to give their children a better life.

And I wonder how many of them would have felt th What I liked: the gorgeous prose, the visceral sense of Toronto the city, the vivid depictions of Tuyen's art installations, the descriptions of the black dance clubs of Toronto in the 60s and 70s. And I wonder how many of them would have felt they were actually living their best life? Anyway, Brand is a poet with an excellent sense of space and setting, and that clearly shines through here. But the characters themselves left me kinda cold.

Mar 23, Matthew Rogers rated it liked it. I liked this book somewhat, but it was the main character Tuyen who I didn't like out of everything. I found Oku and when I read the last part that had him, I was upset that it was a chapter that talked about Jackie's parents more than him Jackie and Carla more interesting than her. Yes they all suffered because of their parents, but those three actually suffered and did their best to deal with it.

Tuyen on the other hand is a lazy, manipulative, hypocritical something year old. She's lazy I liked this book somewhat, but it was the main character Tuyen who I didn't like out of everything. She's lazy because as she is living on her own trying to be an artist which everyone knows is very hard to do and she has no job at all and doesn't plan on getting one, so what does she do to cover her obvious money problems?

Well the answer leads to the manipulative part of her, as from when she was a child and she made her parents get whatever she wanted, during the novel she goes to her parents home to get her mother to give her money, which also leads to her being a hypocrite. So yeah, she is a hypocrite through and through, if she wants to stay away from her family then she should completely stay away in all aspects like Jackie and Carla do, Oku does break away later on from his father as part of his character development.

Also what really upsets me about Tuyen is how throughout the novel the reader finds out that she has a crush on Carla, and Carla knows this but is not a lesbian. Carla has stated many times that she is not interested but this doesn't stop Tuyen from trying to manipulate her friend into finding the lesbian side of herself, so she Tuyen can finally have sex with her crush and claim her Carla as her own.

It's like she doesn't care for Carla's feelings at all, even though she does care about Carla's feelings. But why she doesn't understand her crush completely is because as stated in the beginning, all four friends never revealed anything about their lives with their family.

So Tuyen does not know why during the novel Carla is not interest in sex and distant, but that doesn't stop her from trying to seduce Carla when she should be respecting her boundaries. It's only at the end after finally breaking free from what binds her that the reader gets the sense that Carla will open up to Tuyen, but god throughout the whole novel it's like someone should spray Tuyen with a hose to cool her off. Aside from that factor the book is decent, the way Brand uses language to describe the feeling of the city, the people, and everything in between is amazing.

Like I said Oku, Jackie and Carla are great characters, but because the story focuses more on Tuyen the reader does not get a more in depth look like they do with Tuyen and her brother Quy. While we do see them develop and move past their problems the story is about Tuyen's family and that's what we have to look at a lot more. Overall good story, most characters are great, main character is mehand the ending is meh as well.

Though I love the language and now I'm interested in reading more of Brand's work. Mar 12, Kyle rated it liked it Shelves: book-club , quantumeracy. I can imagine a scene in Canada's House of Commons, Stephen Harper or one of his cronies holding this book up as an example of why we need more prisons: "these children of immigrants flooding into our country, what else can we do with them?

Their kids, on the other hand, boldly strive not to follow in their footsteps, and each becomes heroic doing what otherwise looks like slacking off and occasionally mooching off their bewildered families. Much of the novel tells the story of Toronto, a city I have only been acquainted with for several stop-over hours in total, but it really is anywhere in Canada or at least seems to be exactly the same situation at my end of the country.

I really liked the assessment of anonymity early in the book, as "the big lie of a city" p. Are the daily doings of Tuyen, Oku, Carla and Jackie the illustrations of Quy's adventures in Southeast Asia, like the monk who thinks himself a butterfly's dream?

So back to that imagined scene in the House of Common, whoever said it and whatever proof was provided, that person ought to take a moment to read through Brand's book to get the other side of the story.

Those immigrants did not come to Canada to be milked of their money and corralled into the poorer neighbourhoods or wealthier, secluded suburbs. Instead, they are filling the empty spaces of the second-largest country with the least percent per capita in the world; less and less "Canadians" with more people denied basic rights of citizens in the already overcrowded prison system. Oct 03, Jen Remembered Reads rated it it was ok.

A disappointingly uneven portrait of contemporary Toronto. The story follows the interlocking lives of four twenty-something second-generation and traces their daily interactions with an undercurrent of their alienation from their parents. The A disappointingly uneven portrait of contemporary Toronto. Throughout the story there are moments that work perfectly surrounded by dialogue that sounds like nothing any real person would actually say.

Another character, Carla, the Italian-Jamaican with the dead mother and the delinquent brother, has a fabulous memory of being a child in a cheap apartment that is a perfect description of how childhood memories feel.

But then we hear her thoughts about identity and about her brother and her friends and the artificiality jumps to the forefront again.