All Saints by Liam Callanan - A Lisa Heidle Review

All Saints by Liam Callanan

A Review by Lisa Heidle

All Saints by Liam Callanan introduces us to a world that is filled with educators, teen-agers and Catholic saints, each a cautionary tale, showing us what can happen when we do not heed the lessons of our own choices or of those who have lived before.

The narrator, Ms. Emily Hamilton, is a teacher at All Saints Catholic High School in Newport Beach, California, “…and most people, even the students, called the school All Surf, because it was, improbably, located directly on the beach. Directly: outside our windows, there was an expanse of blacktop basketball courts, and beyond the blacktop, sand, and beyond the sand, surf. Look out any warm day, and you’d see them, before, after, and even, rarely, during school: All Saints kids, playing in the sea.”

Emily teaches theology, but seems more interested in her students. She defines each one in relation to herself. “Paul: my quiet, brilliant student with eyes the size of fists and the color of milked coffee. I love coffee(black). I did not love Paul(against the rules).” As the story unfolds, we learn of the tragic loss of a child when she was young that has kept the woman tied to a time that has passed, that she cannot move away from. The reader questions whether it is a maternal drive that has bound Emily Hamilton to the students of All Saints or if she still considers herself one of them.

Through Emily’s telling, shifting between past and present, we see the want of a woman who has reached the point in her life where she is looking back and is unable to find anything tangible to call her own. Sadly, the lack of self that encompasses so many of Emily’s decisions overflows onto those she connects with the most: her students. “And maybe it’s no surprise that in the fiftieth year of my life, thirty-four years after leaving my father’s house, ten years into a career of teaching children who are, on the whole, quite fortunate, I did something I had never, ever done before.

“I kissed a boy.”

All Saints is a world that is alien and familiar, mystical and contemporary. Stories of saints being burned and beheaded interspersed with cell phones and computers, something many novelists shy away from for fear of seeming cliché, Callanan keeps us firmly planted in the now, while our minds are allowed to roam. All Saints encompasses the struggles that we face, irrelevant of age, and the ghosts that plague us all, at each plateau of our lives.