All Fall Down by Jennifer Weiner

Title: All Fall Down
Author: Jennifer Weiner
Read by: Tracee Chimo

Publisher: Simon & Shuster Audio

Length: 11 CDs, approximately 12 hours
Source: Review Copy from Simon and Shuster Audio.  Thank-you!

Allison Weiss is a wife and mother under a great deal of pressure.  Her daughter Ellie has sensitivity issues and needs a great deal of special care.  Her husband Dave has seemed distant since his job at the newspaper seems to involve more work and less pay.  With a giant house in the suburbs and Ellie enrolled in an expensive private school, Allison becomes the primary breadwinner by co-writing a successful blog.  It soon becomes apparent that Allison’s father has early Alzheimer’s and her distant mother will need help.  Allison starts taking prescription drugs to handle the stress.  Only one pill is soon not enough and she starts playing the game of who to call for prescription refills and how to get illegal drugs online.  Allison is sure that she can handle the drugs, until the day she can’t.

All Fall Down felt like a return to form for Jennifer Weiner to me.  Allison Weiss felt very real to me as a working mother with many similar thoughts and experiences (well except for the using of narcotics to cope).  I could really see how she could go down the road of using narcotics to deal with the stress, which is a little frightening in a way.  I also loved Allison’s back story of her childhood, and how that all tied in with her present situation.   The only part I questioned what Allison’s listing of how much she had to spend on expensive extra classes for Ellie, the private school, and the McMansion in the burbs.  It seemed very much beyond the income that they would realistically be bringing in, and seemed like some of the problem could have been easily solved by better financial and expectation management.  But that would have involved communication and Dave and Ellie were not so good at that at this point in their lives.

I listened to this audiobook relatively quickly as I finished out my summer days at home working in the kitchen.  Tracee Chimo seemed like she was Allison Weiss to me; her narration gave the story a great personality.

Overall, All Fall Down was a great audiobook about the stresses of being a modern day working mom, and how those stresses can take you down an unexpected road in life.  I’ve read all of Jennifer Weiner’s novels, and I felt like this was one of her best.