Peggy LeonBesprekingen

"A Theory of All Things" by Peggy Leon is a fast-paced, well-characterized, enjoyable read about 5 siblings dealing with a difficult familial past. Chapters are short and easy to read, making it a good bedtime book. The characters are interesting and drawn out well, even supporting ones like Willow and the homeless woman who may or may not be the long lost mother.

The writing is sharp and has humor as well as intelligence and pathos. Mary's relationship with her Alzheimer's sufferer father and Mark's first time falling in love-- in his late 30s-- make for touching, humorous storylines.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book and hope to read more works by Leon.

This book was okay. I love the story of the reuniting family and some of the characters were very intriging. But I sometimes found ti hard to stay in the book. It didn't always hold my interest but it did present an interesting outlook of tieing physics to life. Overall it was okay.½

This was a fun little read but this book was also complex to read and I like a book that makes me think.
I am putting the review I have put up on my website:
The book is interesting and was kind of hard for me to finish because this type of book, I have to be in a room by myself to concentrate on it without people around me, whereas other books, I can read it anywhere , with people in the same room talking to me.

When I finally finished the book, I loved the characters and their situations. I could imagine myself watching this book as if it was a movie. I felt myself being connected to the characters and their stories.

The story is about Mary, Mark, Ellie, Luke and Sara who are all siblings and are affected by the suicide of their brother Peter and the abandonment of their mother.

Mary's story is a mother who never left home, and is a surrogate mother and primary caregiver of their father Frank, who suffers from Alzheimer's.

Still following?

Mark is a physicist- who is smart but lacks people and communication skills.

Sara and Ellie are twins and also artists. One lives in New York and the other lives in Greece.

Luke is a wander and an artist.

I like the fact that in the book, there is email conversations, which sets the scene and tells the story.

I did like this book because it was complex and had to think about each and every character. I think this is a great read and this book made me think, about each character, situations and more.

Peggy Leon is a great author and I can't wait to read more of her books!

This is the second of five bound galleys that I’ve received from the Permanent Press. The first, the Chester Chronicles, was great. Peggy Leon’s A Theory of All Things may even be better. And honestly, I’m not just saying that, and I don’t feel under any obligation to love all these books. But I really do love this book!

A Theory of All Things opens with emails to and from Mark, a young man who evidently committed some dire faux pas at a university function. I think I may have met him many years ago, at college, studying math. He was the one that could wax eloquent about string theory but would struggle to understand why it’s not important to calculate minimal lengths for tying parcels together. He was the seriously cute one, genius in the making but not quite capable of living in this world of lesser beings. The author portrays Mark so convincingly that his mishaps evoke astonished laughter, his misunderstandings induce cringes of embarrassment, and his ham-handed attempts to compliment his girlfriend leave readers in despair.

But Mark has a family and a theory; several theories in fact, though he hopes one day to combine them. One theory in particular concerns the singularity of disaster. Can the past, before the world fell apart, actually be considered irrelevant to the present that grows out of its chaos? But who will it hurt to have their feelings and their memories so discounted?

Mark’s family and friends each have their say in this book. The writer sister who stays at home, center of the family, guardian of a father who’s falling apart from Alzheimers; the photographer composing images, real and imagined, into story; the artist digging beneath while missing what might be lying on the surface; and the wandering brother, Luke, who seems to have searched for home ever since he was six.

A disaster blew this family apart, but, like all disasters, it eventually proves to have been built on many things that came before. Characters create their own histories, and even the mathematician proves infinitely creative in his observations of entropy. But it isn’t true that everything’s winding down—not even the father whose broken memories evoke the phantom world of their lost childhoods. And strangers walking into their lives see and build on the foundations of the past.

Like a universe, expanding and contracting, the family is brought back together by circumstance. Love changes them. Memory feeds them. Risk brings them out of themselves. And Mark’s last grasp for truth doesn’t destroy it after all, but ends in a wonderful rebuilding and quiet revelation.

A Theory of All Things is a beautifully hopeful, vividly real and creative novel, built on fascinating characters, tragic situations, bright humor and solidly patient reality. Like one of Luke’s wind-chimes, so intriguingly described that the reader sees and hears them in the written word, the trials of life are turned into something startlingly wonderful, reflecting more than sunlight, elevating life, and mathematics, into art.

This is a fabulous book. A story of a fractured family, told in turn by each member, as they return together and begin to heal. A really amazing book. Not many authors can keep continuity through multiple points of view, but Peggy Leon manages it. A thread that keeps the continuity going is the inclusion of email and phone messages from various family members, uniting the varied viewpoints.

Each family member has their own secrets and issues which begin to be resolved in the course of the book. They are all dealing, in their own ways, with dual events, and the book is the story of their coping and their healing from these events, as well as their own growth and creation of their own universes.

"A Theory of All Things" is an engaging book, a story about love and loss, about how a family endures in crisis and holds itself together even as it spreads apart. It's a story with really interesting characters: a nerd (with Asperger's? seemingly, but it never says); a mother figure; a father with Alzheimer's; twin sisters, one a photographer, the other an artist, both with their own issues to handle; and a wanderer with a tattooed young girlfriend. It's an interesting story, and it's not afraid to leave some questions unanswered -- will Mark and Claire be alright together? Is Ruth really their mom after all? What about the babies? And why DID Mom leave, anyway, and what's up with Frank's past and their marriage? It doesn't leave you frustrated, but it doesn't beat you over the head with a too-neat ending, either. One small criticism: The ending does fall a tad flat. But honestly, I can't think of a better way to have written it, either. Overall, I'd recommend this book, though I wouldn't enthuse over it.

I found myself enjoying this a lot more than I expected. Mark and Willow were always amusing. I enjoyed the writers attempt at the different personalities, but not all of them were quite as distinct as they could have been. Next time I'm looking for fiction outside my usual authors I'll be sure to check Peggy Leon.

Full Disclosure: I received this book for free through the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.

Admittedly, it took me a while to keep all of the characters of this novel straight. Once I caught on, I found myself really pulling for them.

The book is told from the point of view from the members of a family suffering from a traumatic past, a past no one has really overcome.

Each member of the family comes with his or her own idiosyncrasies. I found myself particularly drawn to the socially awkward character of Mark.

This book is definitely worth a read for both its interesting writing style and its story.½

A Theory of All Things far surpassed my expectations. I went in expecting a novel about a fractured family reforming itself. And there is no denying that that is the overall plot of the novel. But Peggy Leon has managed to capture something beautiful within these pages. The narrative is told from the different view points of every family member, even some that are only adopted in. And each manages to have a thoroughly distinct voice of their own, even if you only get to experience them for a few pages. And while the characters themselves are tied together by their center, the oldest sister, Mary. The narrative is weaved in, out, and around the voice of Mark, the now eldest brother. Always feeling himself an outsider to the family dynamic, he tries to explain all the nuances of life and love and family with science. And in the end, his realization that while yes, science and fact can explain every detail it doesn't always mean it gives you the right answer when it comes to dealing with family and other people in general is probably the most moving and intriguing aspect of the entire work.½

This story immediately brings to mind Tolstoy's famous first line in Anna Karenina, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." That is what makes this story unique and interesting to read. There are many books out that share a similar theme but these five siblings make The Theory of All Things interesting in its own right.

I was expecting the use of emails to weaken the story as a whole but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the use of emails strengthened the readers understanding of the character relationships and "fit" with the flow of the plot.

My only complaint is the over use of scientific theory, it takes away from the human connection and often feels forced. I agree with Tolstoy, all unhappy families ARE unhappy in their own way, and thats enough to carry this interesting, creative, humorous, and unique story.

Ms Leon has spun a compelling tale of 5 siblings who have experienced great tragedy and relates how they continue to grow and thrive and heal in spite of many assaults on their family. Every chapter is from a different sibling's point of view with the bulk of the narrative in the head of eldest brother Mark who is a scientist. Mark creates metaphors for everything in his life to physics and in particular the big bang theory (hence the title). The science metaphors are quite adept and beautifully wrought. I found myself reading and re-reading passages about quarks and entropy and the big bang theory so that I could fully appreciate the languge the author used to describe the Bennet family's craziness and Mark's insecurities.

Marks' sisters all get turns at telling thier part of the family saga which involves taking care of an aging parent who suffers from altzheimers, maternal abandonment, suicide, pregnancy, homelessness, and virginity. The characters are lovable--people you would want to know; the plot, although parts are stretched a bit, is a page turner. I definitely cared what happened to these people and the writing gave me reason to sigh every page or two. In additional to beautifully rendered metaphors about science, art is given careful examination as each of the other characters sculpts or creates or photographs. Art and science became equal expressions of these siblings' souls.

I don't want to give too much away because the unfolding plot and twists and turns of each character as they come togther for a family reuion (or reckoning) is the best part of this gentle and good humored novel.

The Bennett family has had their share of tragedy. Their mother walked out the door and never came back and a few years later Peter, the eldest, killed himself. Now the remaining children are in their thirties and discovering the impact those early events had on them.

Mary has never left home. When her mother left, she took on the role of mother, raising her brothers and sisters, helping her father in his business and now caring for him in the early stages of Alzheimers. Mark graduated college at the age of fourteen and now works in the astrophysics department of Stanford. Sarah and Ellie are twins and artists. Sarah photographs the homeless and Ellie paints and sculpts on an island in Greece where she lives with her teenage lover. Luke, the youngest, is also an artist, creating mobiles from found aluminum cans.

Then Mark, the socially awkward genius commits some faux pas at a faculty function, Sarah finds a homeless woman who might be their long lost mother, Ellie discovers she's pregnant and her boyfriend leaves her, and the tattooed and pierced Willow attaches herself to Luke, frightening Mary in the process.

Each character has their own 'Theory' of how things became the way they are. Each sees a different time or event as being integral in the shaping of their strange family dynamic. As their individual dramas draw them all back to their family home, each learns a bit more about themselves and their siblings.

A beautiful, touching, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny look at today's American family full of love and secrets that everyone will be able to relate to. Read this book!

My apologies to the author beforehand, but this story was so full of scientific theory and disjointed filler, the base story was hard to find. The gist was about the dynamics of a family, who suffered a tragedy and how each member dealt with and grew to adulthood.

I received A theory of all Things written by Peggy Leon yesterday in the mail and finished it today. The book is about a family that has been splintered by two events in their past, and now they have to deal with a parent who has Alzheimer's. In the beginning, I was put off by the technical, scientific analogies by the genius son, but as I got into the book, it was obvious that this was who Mark was and how he dealt with life, just as his younger siblings used art. The oldest sister is the caretaker for the family, who keeps her brood safe and is the constant in their lives. But as the story progresses, all of them let others into their lives and learn to move forward.
The siblings in the book weren't anyone that I could make a personal connection with since they were so out there artistically with an endless supply of money to fund their art. But I loved the interactions of the characters and the emails that were sent between them. Having been close to a relative with Alzheimer's, I thought that Peggy Leon's writing captured the disease as it is, devastating with moments of heartbreaking clarity and even humor. She even caught the undercurrents that happen in a large family when there is a family member with a disease. I enjoyed the book and wished that I hadn't read it so fast!½