All I Ask
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Like Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls, All I Ask by the award-winning and highly acclaimed author Eva Crocker is a defining novel of a generation.
A little before seven in the morning, Stacey wakes to the police pounding on her door. They search her home and seize her computer and her phone, telling her they’re looking for “illegal digital material.” Left to unravel what’s happened, Stacey must find a way to take back the privacy and freedom she feels she has lost.
Luckily, she has her friends. Smart and tough and almost terrifyingly open, Stacey and her circle are uncommonly free of biases and boundaries, but this incident reveals how they are still susceptible to society’s traps. Navigating her way through friendship, love, and sex, Stacey strives to restore her self-confidence and to actualize the most authentic way to live her life — one that acknowledges both her power and her vulnerability, her joy and her fear.
All I Ask is a bold and bracing exploration of what it’s like to be young in a time when everything and nothing seems possible. With a playwright’s ear for dialogue and a wry, delicate confidence, Eva Crocker writes with a compassionate but unsentimental eye on human nature that perfectly captures the pitfalls of relying on the people you love.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With her debut novel, Newfoundland’s Eva Crocker captures a distinctly millennial voice: wary but open-minded, tuned into social injustices, and constantly sifting for truths in a tidal wave of social-media chatter and “alternative facts.” Shaken from a dead sleep by a Kafkaesque police raid that confiscates her laptop and phone, wannabe actress Stacey Power feels lost. Like, even more than she normally does. Without her electronic security blankets, Stacey stumbles through the downtown St. John’s scene of weekend indie-rock shows and part-time freelance jobs with the help of her offbeat friends—and a burgeoning romantic relationship with a woman (her first!). We savoured every word of Crocker’s real-talk dialogue and her vibrant, often very funny descriptions of Stacey’s rough-edged but inviting and inclusive world. Watching the book’s heroine manage without a smartphone had us contemplating how well we’d survive with only the GPS of our heart to navigate by.
