What if everything that happens to you is a gift, but you have to search through the wreckage to find it?

Pandora Villaseñor was four years old the first time she can remember love and pain living in the same house. She was fifteen when she became a mother. Seventeen when she left for college on a full scholarship. Thirty-one when she got sober. And forty-two when she finally understood that none of it — not the chaos, not the loss, not the dream she shelved to get out — had been wasted.

All Gifts moves across four decades, following Villaseñor’s investigation of the things you inherit and the things you leave behind. Through poverty, single motherhood, and religion, she doesn’t always choose the things that happen to her, but she chooses to see them as gifts.

Told in Villaseñor’s spare, declarative prose, All Gifts is for anyone who has ever stood in the wreckage and wondered if any of it meant anything.

It did. It does.