Book Review: All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (2014)

by Abbigale Kernya, ​for The 44 North

Managing Editor

The book cover of All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Genre: Literary Fiction, Psychological Fiction, Canadian Lit

Recommended Age: 16+ readers

Rating Scale

Educational value: ​​ 4/5

Positive message: 2/5

Positive role models: 2/5

Violence: 5/5

Sex: 3/5

Language: 2/5

Drinking, drugs, smoking: 4/5

Consumerism:​ 1/5

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“It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.”

—Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

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It’s been a really long time since I have had such a visceral reaction to a book. Around a month or so ago, a good friend of mine recommended Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows after realizing we shared the same love of books that hold the capacity to destroy their reader. 

Lately, I’ve been going through a lot of changes in my life—some good, some bad, all equally as frightening. Reading All My Puny Sorrows found me when everything felt so uncertain and self-doubt continuously plagued my psyche in a never-ending spiral of change. The book follows two sisters Elfreida and Yolandi as Yolandi narrates their sheltered religious upbringing in relation to her elder sister’s rebellious grit and desire to find life outside of their community. 

I should stop my review now to warn readers that this book is not for the faint of heart, and not for those looking for a happy time. 

Elfreida—in all her lust for life and worldwide success as a pianist—wants to die. In the most simplest of ways, Yolandi’s sister doesn’t want to stay alive. Through the book’s narration of Yoli’s perspective, to watch the person she idolizes more than life itself rot in a hospital bed after a failed attempt and balance her role as a sister and friend to the shell of a human once resembling her sister all while dealing with two children and a divorce, All My Puny Sorrows tests the limitations of love; asking just how far will one go to honour those they love even if it kills them, even if it doesn’t.

Through motherhood, sisterhood, and childhood, how does one escape genetic sadness? What do you do when the one person on this planet you love more than anything wants to leave it? In a delicate analysis of human suffering, Toews bends the limit of humanity and explores grief as a crash course for unaltering love, and how far family can go to save each other. 

There was a moment that caught my breath when I first read it. When Elfreida lies in a hospital bed, she tells her sister there is a glass piano inside her and she’s terrified it will break. I won’t get into my interpretation of this imagery, for that I invite you to pick up a copy and decide for yourself what it means.

I remember approaching the climax of this novel and leaving my house in search of a calmer place to finish. With tear-stained cheeks and a hollow hole in my chest, I closed this novel and sat in silence on the couch in my office. All My Puny Sorrows has left a stain on my soul—one that I cannot thank my friend enough for, and one I cannot recommend enough.