By Blessing Musariri
(5 / 5)
All That It Ever Meant is a complex story that really made me think and almost had a philosophical feel to it. Honestly, when asked to describe the book I was reading, I had to respond that I wasn’t really sure, since it obviously had a deeper meaning that would take reading the whole book to completely understand. At the surface, it was a story about a father and his children on a trip to his homeland, Zimbabwe, several months after the mother died. It is obvious this is a family in mourning and trying to heal after a terrible tragedy.
Mati, the middle child in age (14), is the narrator, but it’s almost as if she’s a fly on the wall, describing what is happening to everyone else while being very passive about herself. Interweaved through the story of the family’s trip in Zimbabwe, Mati seems to struggle with telling the story of her mother, past, and something that happened, bringing up bits and pieces out of order but avoiding the true core of what she’s trying to say. Throughout she is joined by Meticais, someone who can only be seen/heard by her but seems to be a guide helping her process all of this, encouraging her to tell her story.
I’ll admit that at the beginning of the book I felt like I was a bit lost in the swirling mind of a teen, jumping from one thought to the next. But the book kept me reading and thinking as the pieces of this puzzle slowly came together. There were multiple times where I had to stop to process paragraphs that felt especially enlightening, not just for this story but for life in general. Over the course of the story, I had a lot of my own theories about what the core of the story really was – there were lots of hints along the way, but it was hard to put together all the pieces in a way that made sense. In the end, the outcome wasn’t at all what I expected, but it was like finding the missing piece to a puzzle that made it all come together.
This was truly a book you weren’t meant to fully understand until the end, but when you get there, you see it for the masterpiece that it is.
I received a free copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program, but all opinions are my own.
