The glittering new book from the author hailed by the Chicago Tribune as "unique, intriguing, and often hilarious."

Here are the events that make up a life: a junior high school fashion crisis, a best friend's betrayal, substance abuse, recovery, finding a satisfying career, dating fiascos, the perfect relationship, the illness and slow death of a parent. This is the life of Charlotte Anne Byers, told by Elizabeth Crane, whose debut, When the Messenger Is Hot, has been praised across the country for its humor and grace.
From the time she moved to New York as a young girl, desperate to tame her ridiculed southern accent, Charlotte Anne Byers has struggled to fit in-even while her strong will makes her clash with everything and everyone around her. With her mother pursuing a career as an opera singer and her father returning to Iowa, Charlotte is caught in the divide between her parents' dreams. She finds a touchstone in Jenna, a friend who will be by Charlotte's side through the death of her mother, several failed career moves, even more failed romances, a detour into alcoholism, and finding true love. In her lifetime Charlotte finds hope and disappointment mingled with faith and desperation, laughter on the heels of weeping, and success assuaging the pain of the most embarrassing failures-her path both all her own and instantly familiar.
All This Heavenly Glory confirms Elizabeth Crane's talents as the writer the San Francisco Chronicle called "hilariously off kilter and utterly refreshing." With whimsy, skepticism, and undaunted emotional frankness, she paints a dazzling portrait of one woman's unique desires and heartbreaks.

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### Amazon.com Review

In *All This Heavenly Glory*, Elizabeth Crane's second collection of interconnected stories, readers are taken on an amusing, if slightly disjointed journey through the life of Charlotte Anne Byers, a spunky six-year-old who grows into a cynical, yet cautiously optimistic adult. Those who enjoyed Crane's debut, *When the Messenger Is Hot*, will surely recognize and appreciate her sharp-witted humor and emotional honesty, but new readers may be put off by her somewhat rambling writing style.

When we first meet Charlotte Anne, she is in the middle of penning a seven-page personal ad that is actually one long sentence, complete with tons of semi-colons and a few alphabetical lists thrown in for good measure. The ad itself is quite hilarious, it begins with a physical description and ends with a hilarious tribute to Owen Wilson; however, the lack of sentence structure may begin to confuse readers after about two pages. This first story is a template for much of what follows in the next 17 vignettes--witty, heartfelt and graceful sentiments are often marred by a chaotic rendering that makes it difficult to actually follow along with the protagonist.

Still, Crane makes it wrothwhile for readers who can navigate the choppy waters of her writing style. She's at her best when describing Charlotte's feelings about particular places, be it New York ("Charlotte has been trying to get out of New York for years. It's not nearly as simple as booking a one-way flight. People get drawn back. Places seem inferior."), L.A. ("there's nothing but Fat Burgers and short pink buildings and more freeways on the freeway..."), or the imaginary Midwestern town she hopes to live in during her next life ("...I sit on the stoop and smoke my one (stale) cigarette of the week from my gold vinyl cigarette case under the almost dark five o'clock sky...").

If we're lucky, perhaps next time Crane will make these stirring moments of clarity easier for us to find. *--Gisele Toueg*

### From Booklist

Crane took our breath away with her first short story collection, *When the Messenger Is Hot* (2003), and she now jazzes readers anew in a sequence of linked stories about the -coming-of-age of one Charlotte Anne Byers. An inveterate list maker, thoughtful Charlotte lives defensively in New York, city of pervs, with her beautiful mother and does her best to decipher school cliques, fashion do's and don'ts, and the relative creepiness of her friends' male relatives. Crane swings back and forth in time, opening windows on Charlotte's covert intelligence, practiced toughness, and persistent hopefulness throughout her fractured girlhood and tween and teen years, during which her goal is to simply keep it together, on into uneasy adulthood, where she drinks too much, falls for the wrong guys, finally finds her calling in film, and loses her mother to cancer. A nervy, tragicomic, and piercing social observer, Crane captures the danger, poignancy, and hilarity of life in her cascading stream-of-consciousness reports from the psyche of an irresistible seeker. *Donna Seaman*
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