A review by jasperdotpdf
Take All of Us by Natalie Leif

adventurous dark medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

Thank you to NetGalley and Holiday House for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I didn‘t know how to feel about being dead or being heartbroken. But I wanted to try figuring it out. I wanted to try doing everything I‘d never let myself do while alive. And if that meant doing it as a messy, rotting, undead corpse…
Fifteen years too late, a couple hours too late, and a town-wide evacuation too late, I wanted it.

Take All of Us is a story about a ragtag group of disabled teens learning to let themselves take up space, set against the backdrop of an Appalachian small town where the dead refuse to stay dead.

There was a tonal dissonance in the book that I struggled with a bit. In the beginning the book reads very young, with the characters being on the lower end of the YA age range. I also noticed that some parts of the dialogue were much closer to actual spoken language, with contractions like "Pro'ly", "Couldn't've" and "Musta" almost disrupting the reading flow. The core moral of the story was also very on the nose, and could have used a bit more subtlety in the way it was communicated, further adding to the juvenile feel of the book. All of this is perfectly fine for a YA book, but led to me thinking that I've probably outgrown the younger end of the genre.

However, the further the book went on the more it grew into something I really enjoyed reading about.
The idea of an ancient, almost eldritch thing in the mountains raising the dead and calling them 'home' was amazing, and I loved seeing it unfold and take up more space in the novel.
Natalie Leif conveys this atmosphere wonderfully with her prose; gorgeously vivid descriptions and paragraphs that made me pause to re-read or annotate them. 

I wanted to scream at them in holy tongues, scream about something, jamming everything I saw into words too impossibly small for it, like a million people speaking together into screaming noise, like the universe crammed into a single dying body, like a seizure lighting up every part of the brain at once, like a cigarette spark in a room full of oil.

Not only does this theme of eldritch horror slowly twist and grow throughout the book, it was also wrapped up really well. The last 10% of the book shines not only with the way it was written, but also with the amazing end it offeres to a book whose plot could have easily been concluded poorly. 

Unfortunately, this part of the novel only comes after the long stretch that is the first 75% of the novel that I struggled to enjoy. I sorely missed a common thread; a more central plot to make it feel less like I had to wade through a book that despite its potential hadn't decided what it wanted to be. Its more youthful traits make it virtually impossible to anticipate the darker, more imposing tone the novel takes on that, while really interesting, ends up fitting like an oversized jumper the book has yet to fully grow into. 

Damn the blood, damn the afterlife, damn death and all its rotting pieces. I loved him like a dog or a soldier, alert and upright before I‘d even thought about moving. I loved him like instinct.

To summmarize, Take All of Us is a diamond in the rough that could have used a bit more polishing in the form of thematic coherency, but nevertheless has some wonderful moments in its prose, plot and characters. It has a core message that I haven't seen before in a lot of media, and is going to mean a lot to people. It's a debut that shows a lot of promise, and I'm interested to see what Natalie Leif writes next.