In rural Ireland, Melody Shea is 33 and pregnant with a 17 year old boy Traveler's child. When she confesses to her husband Pat about what happened and how the child isn't his, Pat makes a choice to leave Melody and thus her stream of consciousness diary begins chronicling her pregnancy-and her life prior to pregnancy- from week 12 up until post-parturm begins.

One of the aspects that is enjoyable about ALL WE SHALL KNOW is the friendship between Melody Shea and Mary Crothery and I also strongly admired how strong and well drawn Mary Crothery's character was. The other aspects about the story weren't as enjoyable for me, especially the handling of pregnancy, the lack of passage of time through months, and no quotation marks.

Normally pregnancy and counting down months followed by weeks and days is a complex time filled with joy, elation, fear and anxiety due to numerous issues that will come up. In ALL WE SHALL KNOW, pregnancy is treated more as an afterthought rather than something that should be life-changing.

What really would have made the story more enjoyable is if the time was referenced frequently beyond weeks by either holidays or seasons, and did the events within a given week happen throughout one day or at different days?

Melody herself didn't read as an actual woman in terms of her pregnancy because she paid scant attention to what is happening to her body and to how its changing to accomodate the baby. Since Melody also suffered from previous miscarriages, I would have expected her to pay extra attention to what was going on with her body and perhaps talk more about her miscarriages beyond how they occured. Instead Melody focuses a lot on her failed friendship with a former schoolmate and what is going on with her new friend Mary Crothery.

There are no quotation marks either, and the ending is very out of the blue and didn't fit in with the mood story. Melody entertained very little thought in her entries or stream of consciousness writing as to what she is doing and why she did what she did.