behind the scenes at the museum book review

Kate Atkinson obviously loves all her characters. It was an event which was to affect the family for a century. She makes detours along the way - footnotes she calls them - to explain the history behind the story, starting from the moment at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer captured Alice, Ruby's great-grandmother, and her children. It's Ruby who narrates the story of the Lennox family, starting with the moment of her conception and through into her adult life. Bunty's not much of a mother either and spends most of the time wishing that the children were elsewhere and that she was anywhere but the flat above the pet shop in the shadow of York Minster. On the night that Ruby is born he's in a pub in Doncaster explaining to a lady in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he's not married. George isn't a lot of help - quite the reverse, in fact. By the night that Ruby is conceived (rather grudgingly, on her part, it has to be said) she already has two children, the sensible but rather-distant Patricia and unpredictable and difficult Gillian. It's a book to buy and keep as it will deserve a second reading.īunty Lennox had never wanted to marry George but after the war he was all that was left. It's a novel to settle into or it's difficult to grasp who's who, but it repays the effort handsomely. (Jan.Summary: A confident and exuberant first novel charts the progress of a family though war and peace. Though the ``footnote'' entries are not quite as gripping as those rendered in Ruby's richly vernacular, energetic recitation, Atkinson's ebullient narrative style captures the troubled Lennox family with wit and poignant accuracy.

(For example, a passage about a pink glass button reveals the story of its original owner, Ruby's great-grandmother Alice, who will abandon her young family and run off with a French magician.) Ruby's richly imagined account includes both the details of daily life and the several tragic events that punctuate the family's mundane existence. Through its ambitious structure, the novel also charts five generations and more than a century of Ruby's family history, as reported in ``footnotes'' that follow relevant chapters. Ruby has two older sisters, willful Gillian and melancholy Patricia.

Her parents own a pet shop her mother, Bunty, bitterly rues having married her philandering husband, George, and daydreams about what her life might have been. Ruby Lennox is a quirky, complex character who relates the events of her life and those of her dysfunctional family with equal parts humor, fervor and candor-starting with her moment of conception in York, England, in 1959: ``I exist!'' Ruby then describes the family she is to join.

The narrator's insistent voice and breezy delivery animates this enchanting first novel by a British writer who won one of the 1993 Ian St.

Behind the scenes at the museum book review