"Like Dahlia with her foster-children, Francis cleverly allows each character talk and move and grow at their own pace. The rhythms of the story are those of family life: the stories and relationships grow over the stretch of years, and at the end we feel as a young adult feels when they are on the brink of leaving home: we suddenly look back see it all for the first time, all in the round."
Patry Francis has written a book with an explosion of remarkable voices. There are two hearts to the story - the wise and vulnerable children who survive and thrive in extraordinary circumstances and the foster mother who understands them in a way nobody else ever could. How Patry Francis stitches their lives together is a triumph.”
★ 04/05/2021
Francis (The Orphans at Race Point) traces the heartbreaking pains of a foster family in this beautifully drawn saga. In small-town Massachusetts in 1959, foster parents Louie Moscatelli, a gruff mechanic, and his reclusive wife Dahlia accept emergency placement of six-year-old Agnes Juniper after she was abused in her previous foster home. After a brief stint with the Moscatellis along with their three other foster children, Jimmy and biological siblings Jon and Zaida, Agnes is placed with a more affluent family, the Dohertys, who want to adopt. But after the Dohertys express dismay about Agnes’s developmental delays and Indigenous heritage, she runs away to the Moscatellis, where she and the other children grow up enduring the community’s scorn as “crummy foster kids.” Three years later, Jon and Zaida’s biological father reappears and takes Jon back to Colorado, cruelly forcing Zaida to choose between joining them and staying with the Moscatellis. Toward the end of the 1960s, Jimmy returns from serving in Vietnam while Agnes is in high school and still living with the Moscatellis, and a frightening person from Agnes’s early childhood reappears, causing a tectonic shift for everybody in the household. The shifting viewpoints and well-rounded characters coalesce to create a tragic and resilient image of an atypical family. This powerful and deeply moving story deserves a wide audience. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary. (Apr.)
"The shifting viewpoints and well-rounded characters coalesce to create a tragic and resilient image of an atypical family. This powerful and deeply moving story deserves a wide audience. " — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"With All the Children Are Home, Patry Francis unspools the sort of heartbreak we only see in the periphery of the news: broken families, abandoned children, lives destroyed by cruelty and violence. As the Moscatelli family gains and loses an assortment of foster children, it also becomes a story that wrests hope and joy out of dark moments, reminding us that family does not require kinship. True family is built of love and perseverance. If this incredibly moving book doesn't bring you to tears, I worry you've misplaced your heart." — Bryn Greenwood, New York Times bestselling author of All the Ugly and Wonderful Things
"A shattering story of how the human spirit can surmount any odds. Gorgeously written, profound, and so inspiring it could be a road map of how to live." — Caroline Leavitt, New York Times Bestselling author of Pictures of You and With or Without You
“This moving novel grabs you by the heart right away and doesn’t let go, celebrating the strength of the children who survive tragedy, the adults who take them in and love them, and the diverse families we make not from the people we might be born to but the people who are there and care.” — Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Family and Those Who Save Us
"Like Dahlia with her foster-children, Francis cleverly allows each character talk and move and grow at their own pace. The rhythms of the story are those of family life: the stories and relationships grow over the stretch of years, and at the end we feel as a young adult feels when they are on the brink of leaving home: we suddenly look back see it all for the first time, all in the round." — Frances Liardet, New York Times bestselling author of We Must Be Brave
"At the heart of Patry Francis’ brilliant new novel is a gorgeous and powerful exploration of unconditional love—masterful in scope and saturated with breathtaking truths on every page. A timeless story set in the 1950s, All the Children Are Home embraces the many voices of the Moscatelli’s foster children and their foster mother—all of them harmed by trauma, abuse and, most of all—abandonment—as they wrestle with the darkest forces of humanity and forge their way toward the light." — Jessica Keener, author of Strangers in Budapest
“Patry Francis has written a book with an explosion of remarkable voices. There are two hearts to the story - the wise and vulnerable children who survive and thrive in extraordinary circumstances and the foster mother who understands them in a way nobody else ever could. How Patry Francis stitches their lives together is a triumph.” — Patricia Dann, author of The Wright Sister
"At the heart of Patry Francis’ brilliant new novel is a gorgeous and powerful exploration of unconditional love—masterful in scope and saturated with breathtaking truths on every page. A timeless story set in the 1950s, All the Children Are Home embraces the many voices of the Moscatelli’s foster children and their foster mother—all of them harmed by trauma, abuse and, most of all—abandonment—as they wrestle with the darkest forces of humanity and forge their way toward the light."
"With All the Children Are Home, Patry Francis unspools the sort of heartbreak we only see in the periphery of the news: broken families, abandoned children, lives destroyed by cruelty and violence. As the Moscatelli family gains and loses an assortment of foster children, it also becomes a story that wrests hope and joy out of dark moments, reminding us that family does not require kinship. True family is built of love and perseverance. If this incredibly moving book doesn't bring you to tears, I worry you've misplaced your heart."
"A shattering story of how the human spirit can surmount any odds. Gorgeously written, profound, and so inspiring it could be a road map of how to live."
11/01/2020
Living in small-town 1950s-60s Massachusetts, Dahlia and Louie Moscatelli are happily raising three foster children when a social worker begs them to take in six-year-old Agnes, an Indigenous child who had been horrifically abused. Agnes's arrival strengthens the family, whose members learn to contend with outside forces that would upend them. From three-time Pushcart Prize nominee Patry (The Liar's Diary); with a 150,000-copy paperback and 20,000-copy hardcover first printing.
