All We Thought We Knew
All We Thought We Knew
By: Michelle Shocklee
[Fulfilled ‘A book with or about cancer’ prompt as part of Shelf Reflection’s 2025 Reading Challenge]
“There are things you need to know. To understand. Our family… it isn’t what you’ve always believed.”
This book is a dual time period historical fiction that explores war-related challenges in both WWII and the Vietnam War.
I have some mixed feelings about this one. Overall I enjoyed reading it and it gave me some things to think about. However, after I finished it and was reflecting on the story I realized I felt a little underwhelmed. What I read was good, but I think I wanted a little bit more.
Also the ending wasn’t as dramatic as I was hoping for.
I have not really read anything set during (or about) the Vietnam War (The Women is on my TBR), so I really liked exploring that. It reminded me of the show This Is Us and the experiences for the brothers while they were in Vietnam and how it affected each of them differently. This story kinda taps into the controversy about America entering that war, but also about the soldiers coming home to an angry populace— a welcome that looked a little different than the soldiers in WWII.
I liked how Shocklee juxtaposes WWII and the Vietnam War. I think because I’m so far removed from both that I forget that so many people who were alive for the Vietnam War still remembered and held trauma from WWII and that had to have influenced how they viewed the Vietnam War.
Mattie Taylor is the main character in the 1969 time period and I must say she is not super likeable. After news that her mother is dying of cancer she returns home to the horse farm in Tennessee. She had abruptly left the year prior after her twin brother died in Vietnam, angry at her parents for letting him enlist. She spent the year living the hippie, free love and drugs lifestyle in California, trying to mask the pain of her loss.
Now that she’s home her anger has not subsided but has now been leveled up as she accuses her father of not caring about her mother’s health. Mattie is determined that there is more to be done to save her mother from the cancer.
There is also the character of Nash, (who was probably my favorite and I would have loved to have more of his story in it) who has become a farmhand for Mattie’s dad in her absence. He went to Vietnam with Mattie’s twin and his best friend, Mark. Nash lives with his own survivor’s guilt and an amputated arm to remind him of what he lost in the war. Part of the character development in this book is Mattie’s attitude towards Nash, which at first is the familiar anger we have come to associate with her.
In all of this, it’s evident from the start that Mattie needs to get off her high horse. Pun intended.
The other time period (1942) revolves around the character Ava Delaney (of Delaney Horse Farms) who has just lost her husband (of a few weeks) in the attack at Pearl Harbor. With nowhere to go she lives with her bitter mother-in-law on the horse farm in Tennessee. She ends up getting a job at the military base, Camp Forrest (historically accurate and interesting to read more about), where she comes into contact with internees— civilians detained just because they were of German, Japanese, or Italian descent.
She develops a relationship with one particular German internee— Gunther— as she helps him improve his English.
The title of this book is what draws these two time periods together— All We Thought We Knew.
Both Ava and Mattie think they know something about the war or about the prisoners or about the soldiers or for Mattie- about their family, but as the story progresses they realize they may have gotten some things wrong. Perhaps not all Germans detained are like Hitler. Perhaps the soldiers who fought in the Vietnam War should still be heralded as heroic even if America’s involvement was a mistake. Perhaps wars are still necessary even if they aren’t good.
This leads me to probably the main reason I felt underwhelmed by this book. There is a lot of build up to this family secret that Mattie’s mom wants her to know. The WWII timeline holds the clues.
But once the big reveal is made, instead of the splash of a boulder hitting the water, it is like the blip of a pebble. The payoff from the build up was disproportionate.
I would have liked to see some more drama as the timelines converge.
The Problem of Evil
Another aspect of this story is Mattie’s struggle with the goodness of God and the evil in the world.
“I can’t believe in a God who would fill your body with a vile disease and then sit back and do nothing to help. I won’t believe in a God who let my brother die a horrific death, fighting a horrific war that should have never happened.”
“I couldn’t blindly believe, I needed logical answers.”
Shocklee uses Mattie’s character to touch on this very common objection to Christianity— If God exists, how do we explain the evil in the world? If God exists either he isn’t good because he doesn’t stop the evil or he can’t because he isn’t powerful enough.
To her credit, Shocklee does point to the cross where we see evidence that whatever happens to us that we can’t explain, we can see Jesus’ sacrifice for us, his entering into a broken world to experience suffering and death, and know that it’s not because he doesn’t love us.
If I had been writing the book I think I would have spent more time answering Mattie’s questions, but Shocklee chose to be more subtle and to allow the reader to do more work as they work through their own struggles. I’m sure there are readers who were already flinching at the ‘God stuff’ in the book and would not have liked any further apologetics, but I say- if you’re going to go there, go all in.
So I’ll offer a few things that were not in the book as a way of defense:
In his book Why Believe? Neil Shenvi mentions C.S. Lewis’s quote as he reflects on his experience as an atheist: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.”
The argument of evil is actually evidence FOR the existence of God. If there is no objective good or evil then how can you argue that evil exists without God? If there is objective good or evil, then where does it come from? Furthermore, knowing my own propensity to be selfish and choose things that only benefit myself, the fact that the world is not completely destroyed by human evilness, that there is any good in the world at all is evidence that God exists, restraining evil however much he sees fit and transforming hearts to desire what is good when before there was only selfishness.
Another important point is that if we think a good God would never allow evil, we are operating out of an assumption that God’s ultimate goal for his people is their happiness. But that is not true. His goal for us is knowledge of him that leads to true and eternal life.
Shenvi says, “If God is less interested in our physical comfort and more interested in producing in us a certain kind of character, then it makes much more sense that we face trials, hardships, and suffering that can produce in us forbearance, bravery, mercy, and compassion.”
Of course there are certain evils that don’t seem to fit into this explanation and so logically we come to place where we have to acknowledge— there is a difference between saying ‘I see no good reason for this evil’ and saying ‘There are no good reasons for this evil.’ Is it possible that if an all-knowing and all-powerful God could stop evil, it’s also possible God is doing it for reasons we don’t understand?
Lastly, we know that God’s ultimate goal is to bring glory to himself. Humans exist to that end. When we find joy in him, it brings glory to him, but we also bring glory to him when we see the fullness of his character— his mercy AND his justice.
“Evil can remain evil and yet can permit two great goods that would otherwise be impossible: the display of God’s mercy to sinners and the display of God’s judgment on sin.”
Much has been written on this and if you’re struggling with this seeming dichotomy of evil and a good God, I would highly encourage you to explore more because there is peace and comfort and truth to be had.
Here is a podcast, an article, this video and ones like it, and this list of relevant articles to start.
Recommendation
If you enjoy historical fiction books, I think you’ll mostly enjoy this one. In my mind the historical fiction genre is not about explosive secrets and big reveals as much as the thriller genre so what let me down could very well have been wrong expectations and you may not be super miffed about it.
Overall, it reads fairly fast and the setting of the story was interesting to read about.
Based on my reviews of most of the historical fiction I’ve read this year, I think I’m still exploring what it takes to be a five star historical fiction read for me and I’d hate to skew your interest in this book just because I want my history to be more surprising.
I also do appreciate that Shocklee included the very real human struggle we have with evil in the world and I think the Vietnam War setting along with the cancer diagnosis was a good ‘storm’ to introduce it and I hope readers contemplate and explore how we can answer that.
So yes, I would loosely recommend this book but it’s not going to knock your socks off.
**Received a copy via Tyndale in exchange for an honest review**
You can order using my affiliate link below.
Share this book review to your social media!