the magic of storytelling
Tessa Calloway is living her dream. She had wanted to be a novelist since she first discovered novels, and she’s finally made. And she’s made it big. Her debut novel has hit the bestseller charts, and her publisher has sent her on a six-week long tour of bookstores. It means leaving her husband and two kids at the big house they just bought, but she loves meeting the booksellers and readers who have fallen in love with her main character Annabelle.
Tessa’s had a big social media following for years, since she went live getting ready to quit her job and go after her dreams. And now it’s all come true. Her book is a success, and now she’s traveling from city to city, hotel room to hotel room, to do readings and book signings. At one hotel, she finds a locket in the night stand drawer. She looks inside and finds photos of a man and a couple of kids. She tries to contact lost and found at the hotel, but they’re closed for the night. So she makes the impulsive decision to go live on her social media again, showing the locket and asking if anyone has lost it.
The next day, Tessa makes the decision to take the locket with her instead of turning it in to the hotel front desk. Readers at her signings start to ask her if she’s found locket-mom yet. She has to admit that she hasn’t. But she also starts getting questions about her past. She’d been quiet about her past. There were some things that had happened when she was younger that she had tried to move on from. But based on the nature of the questions, someone knows something about the past she doesn’t want to talk about.
As she moves on from city to city, it seems like someone is getting closer. She gets messages at her hotels that there is a package for her, but when she goes to the front desk, there is no package. At one hotel, there is a late night fire alarm that turns out to be nothing. On one flight, someone else takes her suitcase. She gets it back, but as these small incidents pile up, Tessa starts to feel like someone is setting her up or just trying to get to her.
Her book keeps growing in popularity, with more weeks on the bestseller list and sold-out signings. But Tessa needs to figure out who is toying with her or this life she’s worked so hard for will slip through her fingers. Her old secrets will come out, destroying her book sales, causing her publisher and agent to drop her, losing the new house, losing her husband. It could all be gone, just like that, unless Tessa channels her inner Annabelle and figures out who it is that is trying to rewrite her story.
All This Could Be Yours is the latest from bestselling author Hank Phillippi Ryan. This novel follows an author with a book called All This Could be Yours on her book tour, which Ryan will be talking about as she goes on book tour to share about her novel All This Could Be Yours. How’s that for crazy?
I enjoyed this book a lot, but there were times I struggled. Tessa makes some impulsive choices that aren’t always great, but she has lots of times where she has the chance to come clean about things, like taking that locket instead of leaving it at the hotel. I wasn’t always sympathetic to her (not that I need a protagonist who is squeaky clean), but I was impressed at how the story wrapped up. Tessa finally shows her intelligence and makes it work out. I liked that a lot and forgave both Tessa and Ryan for a lot of the scenes that had made me ambivalent along the way.
I listened to All This Could Be Yours on audio, narrated by Sarah Mollo-Christensen. I thought she did a beautiful job with Tessa’s voice, capturing her enthusiasm and, later, her paranoia, as her story unfolded. The more I listened to this book, the more I was drawn in, and a lot of that is Mollo-Christensen’s doing. Listening to this book on audio was a fantastic experience.
Egalleys for All This Could Be Yours were provided by Minotaur Books, and a copy of the audio book was provided by Macmillan Audio, both through NetGalley with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.
