An enjoyable read about two friends who solve a mystery of some missing men and discover that things people are not always what they seem.

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed the book. It was easy for me to get the protagonists confused at the beginning, but otherwise, it was a great read about the power of friendship.

I was delighted to receive a digital ARC of <b>All the Little Hopes</b> by Leah Weiss and must offer special thanks to Pamela Jaffee at Sourcebooks,  and NetGalley, for making this possible.     In 2017 I'd read and loved <i>If the Creek Don't Rise</i> (ITCDR), this authors debut novel, and as such was eager to read her latest title.   The two books were set in similar locales but really that's where the similarities ended.      Whereas ITCDR was filled with human ugliness, moonshine fuelled violence and redneck behaviour,  this book was at the other end of the spectrum filled largely with human kindness and wisdom.  

At the centre of All The Little Hopes were two young girls.   Allie Bert Tucker, more commonly known as Bert, and Lucy (Lu) Brown.     Readers were introduced to the girls separately and we got to know something of their lives.   On the day we meet Bert she's thirteen, becoming rebellious and resisting growing up.   Her home in the Appalachian mountains is the only home she's known.   When tragedy befalls her family Bert blames herself, and it seems her father does too.     The very next day she's put on a bus and sent to the other side of the state of North Carolina to live with an Aunt she's never met.   

Lucy is one of six siblings plus another the Brown family decided to adopt some years prior.  I adored the Brown family, the perfect example of a hard working and loving family who support each other.   Mama in particular was filled with goodness and wisdom and was not afraid to share it.  When Lu met Bert they formed an instant friendship.   Born one week apart their upbringings couldn't have been more different.   Lu with her fancy (ten dollar) words and her passion for Nancy Drew books; Bert who had never had any schooling and could not read.     Lu was not only a friend but a sister to Bert and took her under her wing when she desperately needed family.

This was a coming of age novel, a WWII novel built around a couple of quirky historical facts such as a German prisoner of war camp in North Carolina and a government contract for the production of beeswax used to waterproof canvas tents and lubricate ammunition, drill bits, and cables.   Oh, and just as in ITCDR, Leah Weiss incorporated a mystery fitting for Nancy Drew.    Finally I loved the way the community was depicted, the way of life and the majestic scenery of the mountains.

This was an enjoyable read and it is with great pleasure I have provided my unbiased thoughts in exchange for the digital ARC.

Trigger warnings: war, attempted sexual assault of a minor, mental illness

Lucy Brown is the daughter of a farmer living in North Carolina. She has many brothers and sisters, most of whom are still working on the farm. Her oldest brother and brother-in-law are both soldiers fighting across the Atlantic in World War II. Her farm is chosen by the government as a beeswax producer so they are suffering less from rationing and poverty than many others nearby.

Allie Bert Tucker is an only child of a poor family across the state who is sent by her father to help his pregnant sister. Her aunt is mentally unstable and has an absent husband who Bert has never seen.

Bert and Lucy meet when Bert arrives in town, and Bert is mesmerized by Lucy's family farm and their massive personal library. Lucy shares her love of Nancy Drew with Bert, and the girls dream of traveling to the places they have read about. Lucy wants to be just like Nancy Drew, and Bert just wants to be a part of a family like Lucy's.

The novel is slow to start and the girls aren't the most likable of characters, which may deter some readers from finishing the novel. I made it almost 40% through before calling it quits.

This is a story of two young girls during World War II and their experiences. Bert lives in the mountains of North Carolina. Lucy lives in the eastern part of North Carolina. When Bert's father sends her east she becomes friends with Lucy.
I live in North Carolina myself and could relate to Bert in the mountains. My parents would tell stories of the past and many of them sound like experiences from this book. If you enjoy appalachian stories or stories from the 1940's you have to read this book. I learned interesting history about the state that i was not aware of.

Great historical fiction novel based in North Carolina! A new perspective from the families of soldiers fighting abroad, soldiers running POW camps in the US, and the impacts rural America had on the war effort. Weiss weaves several engaging story lines into this novel while introduction new learning at the same time.

A good writer with an interesting story. I liked the missing men mystery and references to Nancy Drew. ARC provided by NetGalley in exchange for a fair review.

This book depicts a young bee keeper, Lucy Brown a 13 year old daughter of a tobacco producing family. She has the good fortune to grow up in a home filled with books and fellow bibliophiles as family members. She loves Nancy Drew books, and eventually teams up with Allie Bert Tucker whom together play amateur detective attempting to solve some local disappearances. Their antics are playful, curious and their friendship develops during a difficult time as the war looms.
The town becomes home to a POW camp and we see the development of that, the people of the town and the girls as their friend they way from ordinary lives that are truly extraordinary. This book is about friendship, the importance of family and hope.

I enjoyed this book and would like to thank Landmark Publishing and NetGalley for the ecopy of this book for a review.

A coming of age story that takes place in North Carolina during WWII. There is mystery, but the best part of the book is the girls and their relationship. I loved them and their references to their favorite books, Nancy Drew.

An emotional drama of two young girls experiences the mysteries of a small town in North Carolina as people disappear, heroes return from WWII and the perils of being a teenager at that time merge. The story is tragic and uplifting at the same time. There will be laughs and tears as the reader traverses the experiences these girls go through.

I found myself being drawn back to the book repeatedly throughout the day. It is fantastic as a read-all-day novel. It is captivating. The characters are mysterious, while real. The plot, theme and dialogue are intriguing. This is a book that will be recommended often.


I received an ARC from Sourcebooks Landmark through NetGalley. This in no way affects my opinion or rating of this book. I am voluntarily submitting this review and am under no obligation to do so.

Charming and heartwarming coming of age tale set in WWII era North Carolina. An eclectic and unforgettable cast of characters made this book one of my favorites so far this year. I loved Lucy with her use of "ten dollar words" and her love of books, Nancy Drew mysteries in particular. Bert's story was heartbreaking and ultimately uplifting. The friendship between the two made for one terrific story! Thank you to @Negalley and the publisher my advanced reading copy.

This book started off strong for me and I was instantly drawn in. Then, the story started to meander and tried to cover too many topics at once. It took a long time for the conclusion of “the missing men”. It was just an “okay” listen (and read) for me.

A new historical fiction book that gives a different view of WWII. I absolutely loved this book. Lucy Brown and Allie “Bert” Tucker are delightful girls growing up in the early 1940s. The author provides a wonderful picture of life in a small town in North Carolina. The characters are well developed and while there are a lot of them, it is not difficult to keep up with them all. There are so many aspects to this story that will delight the reader. You have precocious girls who are determined to be the next Nancy Drew. There are German prisoners in the POW camp in their town who work for the family. Bad men are missing. There are crazy people, those with the gift of “sight,” and family and community relationships. I loved how the chapters were told from the viewpoint of Lucy and Bert. You are told at the beginning whose view you are reading, so it’s important to check before you start the chapter to save any confusion.

The friendship that develops between the two girls is precious. And the fact that Lucy’s family takes Bert in and makes her part of the family will bring tears to your eyes. They are such a wonderful family and the loving and caring nature of the community is touching. I am so pleased I was given the opportunity to read this book. I can’t say enough positive things about this story. I strongly encourage you to put this on your to-be-read list.

Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebook Landmark for my advanced review copy. All opinions and thoughts are my own.

While the backdrop of WWII can feel like an oversaturated market for the historical fiction novel, this one does it well. A true coming of age and friendship tale of two girls from differing socioeconomic backgrounds, this book offers rich characters and pastoral landscapes. The alternating perspectives of Bert and Lucy highlights class differences, while uniting them in childhood experiences.

Spanning 1943-1945, we get a snapshot of their lives, bearing witness to just a few short years, but ones that would weigh heavy influence on the rest of their lives. One of the things I think I liked about this novel, is that the author didn’t try to cover the entirety of the war - it was a story of this family, in this town, in these years - it created a little bubble that easily pulled me into their lives and storyline alike.

If you enjoyed ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’, by Delia Owens, you are very likely to enjoy ‘All the Little Hopes’ by Leah Weiss - it is available for purchase now, and is definitely worth the read.

Sincere thanks to Source Books and author for this advanced readers copy.

~ 👩🏻‍🦰

Author Leah Weiss, who also wrote If The Creek Don't Rise, pens this new release titled All The Little Hopes.
A Southern story of friendship forged by books, their mutual love of mysteries, boys and bees. We get a front row seat as these two unlikely siblings grow up amongst the backdrop of World War II.

Lush with Southern atmosphere, All The Little Hopes is reminiscent of a flavor similar to To Kill A Mockingbird.
Author Weiss does an amazing job of including little-known historical facts of the time. I found myself pausing the book to look up such interesting subjects such as Nazi POW camps in North Carolina, Blue Ghost fireflies, Glenn Miller's unusual disappearance, Russian test pilots off the east coast of the USA and Appalachia folklore as well.

She even touches upon a "mysterious contagious virus" that almost wipes out an entire family and references the Flu Pandemic of 1918 which is particularly interesting because our current pandemic was unknown to her since the book was written in early 2019.

Ghosts, spirits, clairvoyants, spiritual healers, and Ouija Boards abound. This novel is a quick-paced, fun ride and I loved every minute of it.

All The Little Hopes will pull you in, make you laugh, tug at your heart and blurs the line between what's right, what's wrong, and what we know to be true.

A special thank you to NetGalley for an advanced reading copy of this novel in exchange for an unbiased review. All The Little Hopes is now currently available for sale wherever you purchase books.

Thank you NetGalley for an e-ARC of All the Little Hopes by Leah Weiss.
All the Little Hopes checked a lot of boxes for me: spunky characters, historical references, mystery, and family. Leah Weiss created characters the reader could rally behind even with their flaws. The mystery was predictable, but added depth to the plot. The Brown family was straight out of a Norman Rockwell photo; good people adding good to their world.

Thick with Southern culture, the newest novel from Leah Weiss has all the good food, folksy drawls and aw shucks humility you'd expect to see in a Carolina novel set in the 1940's. Thirteen year old girls Lucy and Bert meet by accident on a bridge overlooking the local river. What starts out as a coincidence forges into a true sisterhood.

I've always loved reading historical fiction novels set during the second World War. It's such an interesting time period and there is so much to explore, so I wanted to like this novel more than I did when I finished. It had all the pieces there: men serving abroad with anxious families at home, Nazi POWs on U.S. soil (who knew?), mysterious military planes, but it never really materialized.

Unfortunately, for me this book never really fully came together. I think that this book suffered from a lack of focus. It wanted it to be a mystery (Bert and Lu were fans of Nancy Drew and it was perfect), but it ended up being much more of a coming-of-age tale. This was fine, I guess, but as a reader I thought the mystery was a much better plot point. I felt myself wanting the story to turn back in that direction, but it never did.

Overall the story was just okay for me.

Thanks to Netgalley, the author and Sourcebooks Landmark for an early copy to read and review.

Last year, I read and reviewed Weiss’s debut novel, If the Creek Don’t Rise, which was delightful. This year’s novel, All the Little Hopes, is better still. My thanks go to Net Galley and Sourcebooks Landmark for the review copy.

Weiss’s story is of two girls born in different parts of North Carolina, both geographically and culturally, and of how they come together and ultimately, become each other’s family. The novels I love best provide a resonant setting, an original plot, and compelling character development; these three elements don’t compete for the reader’s attention, but rather, each of them serves to develop and reinforce the others. That’s what I find here.

Our story takes place in the 1940s, during World War II. The narrative comes to us in the first person, with the point of view alternating between the girls; we begin with Lucy. Her father is a farmer, and by far his biggest crop is honey. As the story opens, government men come to visit, and they want to buy all of his honey for the war effort. Lucy’s eldest sibling and brother-in-law have both gone to serve in the military, and there’s an emotional scene after the government men leave, because they’ve given permission for both sons to return home to help with the honey. Lucy’s mother pleads with her father to write to them and order them home at once; he stands firm, saying that the choice must be their own. Now we begin seeing how conflict plays out in this family, and how the various relationships work. But all of it is done through the plot, so that we aren’t slowed down by a bunch of emo for its own sake.

Bert, whose given name is Allie Bert, lives in the mountains, and her family has far fewer resources than Lucy’s. Her story unfolds with the death of her mother in childbirth, along with the baby. Her father sends her to live with his sister, Violet, who is expecting a baby of her own. He suggests that Violet will need household help, and Bert can provide it; he doesn’t know that Violet has gone stark, raving mad. When Bert arrives, Violet is behaving irrationally and at times, violently. She locks Bert out of the house in a storm, and the nearest house is that of the Brown family. And so it begins.

One of the most critical aspects of this book’s success is Weiss’s facility in drawing the girls, who are just beginning adolescence. At the outset, we learn that Lucy takes pride in her advanced vocabulary. I groan, because this is often a device that amateurs use to try to gloss over their lack of knowledge relating to adolescents’ development. Make the girl smart, they figure, and then they will have license to write her as if she were an adult. Not so here! These girls are girls. Though it’s not an essential part of the plot, one of my favorite moments is when the girls are locked in a bitter, long-lasting quarrel over whether Nancy Drew is a real person. Bert says she is not; Lucy is sure she is. This isn’t silly to them. It’s a bitter thing. Further into the book, Lucy realizes that it’s more important to be understood, than to use the most advanced word she can come up with. And so my estimation of Weiss rises even higher.

When someone comes from truly devastating poverty, the few things that they own take on great importance. Bert arrives with a treasure box, and in it, she keeps things that may seem inconsequential, but that mean the world to her. And Bert is also light-fingered. After meeting Lucy’s mother, who is one of the nicest people she’s met in her life, she pockets a loose button that Mama means to sew back onto a garment. Bert wants this button fiercely, because Mama has touched it. Later—much later—she confesses this to Lucy, and then to Mama, and is flabbergasted when there is no harsh punishment. She explains to a neighbor,

“Mama says sometimes stealing is necessary, but that don’t make a lick of sense. Stealing’s a crime. Back home, there ain’t two ways bout stealing. You get a whipping. You get sent to your room with no supper. No breakfast the next day neither. Stealing is a sin against the Lord Jesus, so salt gets put on the floor, and you get on your knees on that salt and stay there till you cry out and your knees bleed, till you fall over and Pa says that’s enough.”

One feature of the story is when Nazi prisoners of war are housed nearby, and they become available as labor. At first locals fear them, but then they get to know some of them, and they discover that like themselves, the prisoners play marbles. Gradually, the rules about avoiding the prisoners relaxes to where the girls are allowed to play marbles with them sometimes. “We tread close to the sin of pride when it comes to marbles. I don’t think we can help ourselves.” And now I am veering toward an eyeroll, because (yes, I’ll say it again,) writers are awfully quick to find humanity in Caucasian enemies, whereas we know the story would have been very different had these prisoners been Japanese. BUT, as my eyes narrow and my frown lines deepen, another development occurs that reminds us that these men aren’t really our friends. Again, my admiration increases.
Weiss’s last book was a delight for the first eighty-percent, but it faltered at the end, and so I was eager to see whether this novel stands up all the way through. I love the ending!

You can get this book now, and if you love excellent historical fiction, excellent Southern fiction, or excellent literature in general, you should get it sooner rather than later. If you’re stone cold broke, get on the list at your local library. This is one of the year’s best, hands down.

This moving coming of age story set in the 1940’s in North Carolina kept me turning pages well into the night. Lucy, whose family are bibliophiles and bee keepers, meets Bert, whose father has sent her to live with her aunt after the death of her mother during childbirth and they instantly become best friends. There are many differences in their respective families but their bond becomes stronger and stronger. The story alternates from both girls perspective and is rife with each of their personalities. Loved the inclusion of Lucy’s love for Nancy Drew as she was a big part of my love for reading as a young girl. The facts that Lucy shares throughout the book were reflective of her thirst for knowledge and retention of information. I was fascinated to learn that the government purchased beeswax from farmers during the war years and the way the farmers replaced their honey with sugar water. The camp for German prisoners and the village’s gradual acceptance of them added dimension and timeliness to this read. There were such fascinating pockets of factual information dispersed throughout this gem of a story.
The mystery of the missing men added to my desire to read “just one more chapter” but the revelation was not a surprise to me. Leah made both Lucy and Bert walk off the pages and into my heart. Other characters, Aunt Fannieball and Irene, also stole my heart. Loved the author’s notes as well.
Many many thanks to Leah Weiss, Sourcebooks Landmark, and NetGalley for providing me with the pleasure I received reading an arc of this just published book. Keep writing Leah Weiss - you have a new fan.

So much is good about this book. It's a coming of age story told by two 13-year-old girls, Lucy and Bert, who live in a small North Carolina town during WWII. It has all the quirky characters a southern small town could want, some good and some definitely not good.

Bert has been sent east to help care for a pregnant aunt she's never met and an abusive uncle. She escapes that house and finds Lucy and the Brown family, who take her in and give her the love she's been missing most of her life. And they meet the mysterious Trula Freed who seems to have answers to questions you don't even want to ask.

German POWs are being hired out to work the fields as more and more Americans are going off to fight and the Brown family gets some of these prisoners. They have a son and a son-in-law who are soldiers, and one of them is MIA, so there is a lot of tension and anger - not just from the Browns, but from the other townspeople, too.

The characters and the atmosphere really drew me in. The writing was beautiful and the friendship between Lucy and Bert was great.

My thanks to Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.