All the Crooked Saints (and other September reads)

I finished 10 books in September:

The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (reread)
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips (audiobook)
The One by Kiera Cass
The People We Hate at the Wedding by Grant Ginder (audiobook)
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
Ripper by Isabel Allende (audiobook)
The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life by Tara Altebrando (audiobook)
A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas
Into the Water by Paula Hawkins (audiobook)
All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Steifvater (ARC)


I received an advance reader’s copy of All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater from Scholastic Press in exchange for my honest review.

All the Crooked Saints is the story of a miraculous family. Literally. The Soria family lives in the community of Bicho Raro in southwest Colorado in 1962. Everyone in the family has the ability to perform miracles, though there is one person in each generation who serves as the primary miracle worker in their small community of pilgrims. This generation’s miracle worker is Daniel.

The pilgrims are not Sorias. They are individuals who have been drawn here by their need for a miracle. It is Daniel’s job to perform the first miracle, to draw the darkness out of the pilgrim so that they can see what they are fighting. It is the pilgrim’s job to perform the second miracle, to defeat their own darkness. The Sorias cannot help the pilgrims with the second miracle, or the will be cursed.

This is what gets Daniel into trouble. He can’t resist the urge to help Marisita, a girl trapped in a butterfly covered wedding dress. A girl stuck inside her own continual rainstorm. When Daniel tries to help Marisita, his own darkness surges forward, sending him into the desert, perhaps to die alone.

Beatriz and Joaquin are more than family to Daniel. They are friends. They are conspirators (in their construction of an illegal pirate radio station in a rusty box truck). They are determined to save Daniel. The difficulty is helping Daniel perform his own second miracle without being cursed themselves.

As always, the writing in this novel is lovely. Stiefvater has a way of taking words and putting them together in combinations that are awkwardly beautiful. The unexpected phrasings and juxtapositions of thought and image are perfect, sometimes lingering with me long after I put the book down.

But there was something different in the tone of this book, the syntax that pervaded this story. There was a sense of distance from the characters. It might just have been that the cast of this book was large. Stiefvater has the entire (large) Soria clan to keep track of. Plus the menagerie of pilgrims that have set up camp around them. Stiefvater gives us a glimpse into each of them, and they each have their own fascinating story. But with so many, we don’t get to spend a lot of time with any of them.

Overall, I didn’t feel as connected to any of the characters in this story as I usually do with Stiefvater’s books. I felt like I watching the story unfold from a distance, or hearing the story told years later (which I guess is actually true in this case), instead of living through the story with them.