Kathleen Basi's Reviews > All They Ask Is Everything

It's every mother's nightmare: your kids are asleep, it's cool outside, you have to decide whether to get them up or let them sleep while you spend 5 minutes in the store--and when you come back, child protective services is taking your kids away from you.

Hadley Leggett's stunning debut follows three women at odds with each other, all of them desperate to love the two young girls at the center of the storm. Hannah, their biological mother, paralyzed by grief and depression; Julie, the girls' foster mother, who has a powerful unfulfilled longing for motherhood; and Elaine, the girls' grandmother, estranged from her family and desperate to reunite. Playing these women's hurts and mistakes and biases off each other makes for high drama, indeed. I love a book where there are no "bad guys," books in which everyone is doing their best and it's still a mess. Because that's what life is like, and in a book we know we're going to get to an ending that will satisfy--which we don't always get in real life.

Leggett is a gifted author, deftly weaving plot threads and characters together to create a tapestry of stunning beauty and heart-wrenching clarity.