This is my all time favorite book! When I was a child, I would get so excited about going back to school. Why? I knew on the first day of school, our Librarian would be reading to our class, "Mr. Wiggles". She would have a special "Mr. Wiggles" voice, and we all loved hearing it. When we reached the fourth grade, the Librarian said she'd no longer be reading "Mr. Wiggles" to us. We were so dissapointed, and asked her to continue. We made sure she knew we would never be too old for "Mr. Wiggles". Now that I am grown, and have a young child of my own, I read it to him. It is my son's favorite book, and our favorite time together. This book, and that Librarian, gave me the love of reading. Hopefully, it will do the same for my children. Read this book to your kids, and you will give them the gift of literacy.

Mr. Wiggle's Book is a very useful tool for the elementary school librarian who is trying to make sure that children take care of their library books. The illustrations are wonderful and very realistic. I have used this book in a story time situation and the children really thought that someone had written or torn this book. After using this book, the children really seem to enjoy making sure that their library books don't end up like Mr. Wiggle's.

I really didn't expect to like this book as much as I did. I found it a very enthralling, believable read. The characters were so real and loveable, while some remained hated, it's what made it real.

This was not a book drenched in legal terms, I would have expected a book by a lawyer to be very legal and politically correct. This was a story about Melanie Ratleer finding out who she is, during her childhood with an abusive father, to her adulthood following in his professional footsteps. In the present, Melaine is a newly appointed judge, who upon repeated trips back home to her step family sees abuse in others, and people who do things about it through any means necessary.

This was a very well written novel, that kept me very interested. I would definitely recommend this book.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I am looking foward to the next Paula Sharp novel (I Loved You All)that I've purchased. I would recommend this book very highly. I think you will enjoy this book even if you do not agree with the point of views that are a big part of the story.

This is definitely a five-star book. As an attorney who works in the Ohio courts, I found Crows over a Wheatfield amazingly accurate - we're lucky that someone who knows the courts writes so well, too. The portrait of Mildred Steck's abusive husband Daniel is ingenious - he really does talk and act like such people do. I love the way he contradicts himself without even realizing it, the way he seems completely disassociated from his own nastiness. In real life, I think men like him would probably be more dangerous, although I can see why Sharp would have wanted to rein him in a little, to draw a more subtle portrait. My favorite character in this book is Daniel's wife, Mildred. I like her because she defies all stereotypes of battered women - she's just an ordinary person who had the misfortune of marrying someone who was not so ordinary. Mildred is so full of life and humor - the best thing about this book is the way Sharp, astonishingly, keeps you laughing even in the worst of times. The novel's fourth book, in which Mildred starts an underground railroad for battered women, was the best of the four books of the novel. The detailing of how the railroad was set up was so ingenious, and its architects and philosophy so wry and amusing. Quite an indictment of the legal system. Anyone who ever thinks they might end up in a matrimonial court case should read this book.

In the capable hands of novelist Paula Sharp, the so-called "right-to-life" movement serves as a backdrop to an extraordinary examination of the consequences of loneliness on a series of fully-realized characters. The people who live in the pages of "I Loved You All" are fully-realized individuals, each of whom struggles with the anguish of either self-imposed or social isolation. Even the setting, bleak, remote Stein, New York enhances the eccentricities and frustrations of the characters in this compelling, believable, and ultimately redemptive novel.

Told through the eyes of the endearingly hyperkinetic eight-year-old Penny Daigle, the novel gains its tension through the unspoken battle between her beleaguered but vibrant mother Marguerite and the eerily stoic Isabelle Flood, whose anti-abortion stance masks a life bereft of human connection. Penny's sister Mahalia, compelled by circumstances and personal needs, reflects and intensifies the loneliness experienced by the two women who exert the most profound influence over her life: her mother Marguerite and her caretaker/mentor/role model, Isabelle.

"I Loved You All," however, is much more about character development than a plot that pivots around the struggle over abortion rights. The four females who comprise the core of the novel's attention each face their own demons; each confronts a brutal loneliness and each develops the means to face her adversary. Marguerite, though absent much of the novel, has enormous appeal. While young, she sacrifices her adolesence so that she may care for her recently blinded brother, F.X. Denied the opportunity of romance and free time, Marguerite is rescued by a loving marriage, which ends precipitously when her husband dies and leaves Marguerite the responsibility of raising two vastly different daughters. A hell-raiser by nature, the grating endless restrictions of work, parenting and homemaking submerge Marguerite in a haze of unfulfillment. A transplanted Louisianan suffering through life in barren upstate New York, Marguerite staves off oblivion through drink.

Only the steadfast dedication of the two men who love her (her brother F.X. and her beau, David) convinces her to return to her home state to recover. In her absence, her daughters take divergent paths to alleviate their sense of abandonment and isolation. The oldest, Mahalia, obliterates her beauty and effaces her personality as she orbits more and more closely around Isabelle Flood. Paula Sharp draws an exquisite picture of a teen-ager at odds with her family and her self as she presents Mahalia selecting involvement in a dessicated and stultifying "right-to-life" church instead of the unpredictable, but liberating, prospects of adolesence. Mahalia's youngest sister, Penny, is literally hell on wheels. Her unfettered enthusiasm for life and unquenchable thirst for knowledge and adventure thinly mask a child vulnerable to her own feelings of being unmoored, adrift amidst a family which is disintegrating. For sheer, unadulterated energy and commitment to life, Penny is unparalleled; yet all her sound and fury pivot around her profound misery at being apart from her mother.

The novel's most enigmatic character, Isabelle Flood, suffers her own sequestered life. Unwanted from childhood and untouched by love, Isabelle satisfies her need for connection through a ramrod dedication to the precepts of the anti-abortion movement. Though capable of caring for Mahalia and Penny during Marguerite's absence but utterly unable to savor the messy possibilities of love, Isabelle is best seen not as a mouthpiece for a political movement, but the tragic residue of a culture which offers alienated and rejected adults little opportunity for a happy life. She is at once honorable and detestable, idealistic and repressive, caring and insensitive. Her contradictions give her a tragic believability.

In a revealing interview, Paula Sharp confesses, "I can't imagine life without stories. I think I would evaporate if I stopped writing." Her briliant and absorbing "I Loved You All" endeavors to educate its audience about the most painful aspects of life: how humans battle, often without the benefit of emotional roadmaps, to overcome loneliness. That Ms. Sharp has done so though a novel which charts the tumultuous waters of the struggle for reproductive rights is all the more remarkable.

As someone who reads in excess of 80 books a year, I encounter a lot of bad novels. Even in books that are otherwise enjoyable, there are usually a few badly worded phrases or character anomalies that stop me cold. Paula Sharp's new novel "I Loved You All" has none of those errors. It is FLAWLESS. Step into the mind of Sharp's narrator Penny and I defy you to want to leave. Penny is sharp, quick-witted and observant in the tradition of Scout Finch. Her mother, Marguerite, a widow, is spiraling down into alcohol addiction. Penny has an older sister, Mahalia,who becomes friends with the a fervently religious neighbor named Isabel Flood. The neighbor disdains everything from the use of the word 'Jeez' to television and Penny loathes her. But, in Isabel Flood, Mahalia finds the mother she so sorely missed with Marguerite. When Marguerite is forced into residential treatment for her alcoholism, the children are sent to live with Isabel with terrible results for Penny. Reviewers are classifying this as an abortion book, which is a shame. With the exception of a few mentions early on, abortion rarely even enters the book until more than halfway through. It is first and foremost the story of a family, the most lovable family, incidentally, in modern fiction, set against the backdrop (yes) of the abortion debate in the late seventies. Paula Sharp definitely owes something to Harper Lee in her sharp characterizations of spirited Southern tomboys (no matter where they live at the moment) and the way that family loyalties are affected by political issues. The characters are true, the plot flows smoothly (albeit too quickly--this is a book you don't want to end) and the "moral" (such as it is) is there, without overstepping the bounds into preachiness. Whatever your beliefs about abortion, this is a book not to be missed. It is smart, kind and above all, loving in its handling of every type of person and problem. Thoroughly enjoyable, Paula Sharp gives the best of what popular fiction has to offer and a book that anyone who loved "To Kill A Mockingbird" should not miss.

I loved Paula Sharp's Crows over a Wheatfield -- it was so gripping, and so fearless in the way it delved into a controversial topic, and it had the kind of characters you're sorry to say good-bye to at the end of a novel. I Loved You All has those same qualities, but it's a completely different kind of book. While Crows over a Wheatfield was mostly serious (about domestic violence), this new novel is more like Sharp's earlier works, The Woman Who Was Not All There and Lost in Jersey City. It's laugh-out-loud funny, even though it's about a pretty heavy subject -- abortion politics.

I think Paula Sharp's ability to build characters is phenomenal -- when I read this book, sometimes I felt like the characters were more real than me! To begin with, there's Marguerite Daigle, a hard-drinking single parent transplanted from Louisiana to a bleak town in New York where everyone is apparently employed by the local prison or in it. There's her parole officer boyfriend who entertains her children by telling them stories about criminals. There's Marguerite's 8-year-old daughter Penny, a free spirit who knows no bounds -- who, for example, injures herself by riding a bicycle along the top of an eight-foot wall, and whose teacher tells her she's missing the piece people call a "conscience." Penny's 15-year-old sister is furious at her mother and so walks right into the arms of -- who else? A flaming, fanatical right-to-lifer with an agenda of her own. And of all the characters, the right-to-lifer Isabel Flood is the best. She's vivid and well-rounded and entertaining. Even if your politics diverge from hers, you admire her for her energy and uniqueness, and come to accept her on her own terms.

Even though this is a very funny book, I found it also made me think a little more deeply about right-to-life politics. The novel shows what happens when someone who is fundamentally religious finds her religious beliefs compromised by people within her own movement who have a political agenda that is clearly not godly. The novel also shows how someone who is not a violent right-to-lifer might be led to violence inadvertently by associating herself with the wrong people.

There are very few literary writers in America today who tackle these hard political subjects. We're lucky to have a writer like Paula Sharp doing it. This novel is great! I Loved You All is also a perfect Reading Group novel, both because it's beautifully written and because the way it handles the controversial topic of abortion is fresh and interesting.

Netta and Stanley are two losers who bask in their loser-ness. They live buried in despair, boredom, short-sightedness, stupidity - call it what you will - and seem to relish in it. These are two people I wouldn't want to know. The book is a celebration of two people who live in a psychological, mental, social hole and think it a great feat to peer over the edge rather than attempting to climb out. Instead of looking up and beyond the confines of the town they hate, they look down at their shoes and wonder why they keep running into obstacles. The book ends not far from where it began, with a feeling of isolation and endless nothingness. One begins to wonder who "The Imposter" really is....

A fun series of short stories where someone, somehow is an imposter, Paula Sharp can put a fresh twist on everything. You'll laugh, frown, smile, and most of all care about the characters. Write more about Netta and Stanley!

A standout is where a deadbeat dad is literally fought off by a bunch of kids, the town gossip, and a rake.