This Is All

Aidan Chambers, a British author whose work has earned the Michael L. Printz Award and the Carnegie Medal, wrote this novel as a diary-like pillow book. Its narrator, Cordelia Kenn, is nineteen and has decided to set down her life for the daughter she is expecting. Her account is candid and unguarded, touching on love, sex, poetry, the natural world, religion, and her own sense of who she is.

Cordelia's notes wander freely. She considers Shakespeare and the body, menstruation and piano practice, friendship and trees, and how the mind works when awake and asleep. Two relationships anchor her story: her first lover, William Blacklin, and Julie, a teacher who guides her spiritual searching. Through these people and her own reflections, Cordelia comes across as provocative, magnetic, and impossible to shake off.