Family Album

by Penelope Lively

Family Album is the story of a sprawling family with a dark secret at its heart. Having left Allersmead, the family estate, as a teenager, daughter Gina returns for a visit with her new boyfriend. His curiosity about her mysterious past leads to reflection and revelations, and soon the entire family -- six grown children, all with their own reasons for having left home -- must confront the unspoken secret from their past.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Family, Contemporary, Novels, British Literature

259 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger.

Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra’s Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began.

She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List, and DBE in 2012.

Penelope Lively lives in London. She was married to Jack Lively, who died in 1998.

Reviews

[B the BookAddict · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this stunning portrait of family life, Penelope Lively delves below the surface, making the ordinary quite extraordinary. She introduces you in depth to some characters, a few will be a snapshot seen via opinion but you will come to realize you have an insight into everyone in this messy three adult, six children household who live at the shabbily majestic Allersmead. Lively bestows upon you portions of family life, opinions and remembrances of the siblings, their parents and the au pair.

Allersmead, that shabby Edwardian mansion, is the setting for the household of writer Charles, housewife and mother Alison, the au pair Ingrid and “explosive Paul, precocious Gina, pretty Sandra, adventurous Kate, clever Roger and flighty Clare”. From the blurb: “Beneath the postcard sheen, however, this picture is clouded by a distant father, inexplicable outbursts and long suppressed secrets that no-one dares mention. For years, Alison has protected her illusion of domestic perfection but as they return to their former home, they confront the effects of the past choices on their current adult lives.”

Don’t be fooled into thinking this novel should fall under the ChickLit banner; it is not: Family Album is an intelligent and revealing drama. Lively has a wonderful economy of words, a talent for getting to the heart of the matter and is never cruel; all the while leading us to review our own lives and family relationships.

“...when Sandra returns to Allersmead today, she seems to be visiting some historic site which is entirely strange, entirely surprising at yet another level infinitely familiar.”

“Allersmead was always self sufficient; it is indeed diminished now, with the children gone, but it remains the unit it always was. And it is populated by all those winsome ghosts – perpetually happy, harmonious, the ideal family: they sing on the swings, they dig in the sandbox; the nursery gramophone croons away upstairs ‘the farmer wants a wife’…

By the novel’s conclusion, Lively has propelled me into evaluating my own ‘Family Album’. Whether you have siblings or not, you are drawn into surveying your own family life, from snatches of childhood memories to adult persuasions.

Penelope Lively is the award winning author of a vast number of novels including the Booker prize winning Moon Tiger (which I recommend most highly). My evaluation of the insightful Family Album: 4★.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little uneven perhaps, but this is a perceptive and rather moving study of family dynamics.

The book starts with Gina, a journalist and her new partner as she introduces him to her parents and their home for the first time. Gina's family is large, unconventional and dysfunctional - her parents are Charles, a writer who spends most of his time alone in his study, and Alison, a traditional housewife, and Gina is the second of six children. Also living with the parents are Ingrid, once an au pair but now a permanent part of the family, and her oldest brother Paul, who drifts between various casual jobs.

The focus of the book shifts between these nine characters, though Gina is the principal protagonist, but the house and the family are at its heart, and Lively explores how it, and the open secrets they never discuss, affect her cast.

A very enjoyable read.

[Linda C · Rating 1 out of 5]

There is both good news and bad news about this book. The good news is that it was only 200 pages. The bad news is that it was 200 very boring pages. I finished it, but barely, and I am hard pressed to think of a more unpleasant 200 page book.

While the concept was somewhat intriguing, the characters were so unpleasant, and the writing so trite, that it was a highly unpleasant reading experience. The book was about-- what? There didn't seem to be any particular plot; while Jerry Seinfeld may have been able to make a fortune with a show about nothing, the concept didn't work as well in book form. If you think about each chapter as a photo in an album, with a different character's memories of the event, it could have been a rather interesting little book. Unfortunately, there was not a shade of nostalgia in the memories. Real people, while looking through a family album, remember the good times and gloss over, or forget, the bad times. These characters not only refused to forget the mostly imagined bad times, they wallowed in them.

If I had been the mother character, Alison, and raised such tiresome, ungrateful brats as her adult children turned out to be, I would have shipped them off to boarding school and moved to India to join an ashram or something. Yes, she was a bit of a pain (but what mother isn't?) and their father was somewhat uninvolved, but they actually had a lovely upbringing, for which they were all completely ungrateful.

And then we get to the triteness of the writing. I find it hard to believe that Penelope Lively was a Booker finalist-- maybe it was a bad year for novels. The writing was dreadful, in particular, relating to the mother. Alison seemed to always be "crying" (as in, speaking loudly, not actual tears.) "This is a real family home," Alison cries. "You know that isn't true," Alison cries. Alison seems to be crying at least 4 times on each page. Surely, a Booker finalist should be able to come up with another descriptive term to indicate speaking loudly. Alison also "beams", "glows", "fizzes" "pink-faced, runs herself to ground." Runs herself to ground-- what is that? Is she a fox trying to outrun the hounds?

This was my first Lively book, and will definitely be the last.

[Tatevik · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have an interesting relationship with Lively. I left her most two famous books but fell in love with less known ones. Family Album became another favorite.

This is an ordinary story about a family. A big family in a big house with a mother, an au pair, 6 children, a father.

The home – Allersmead.
Allersmead has a mother, Alison. For her, marriage and motherhood is a profession, or as one of the children says, rather, “the by-products of marriage have been. Allersmead; us."

"But you love them all, and if there are six you don't spread it more thinly, somehow there's just more of it. When they're small they love you back, but of course later even if they still do it doesn't much show, and you just have to reckon with that, you can't expect demonstrations…"

She is always on top of things and when she feels something shuttering, she feels submerged by the house, the family, instead of riding high, in her element, in control.
She is always there, making memories, cooking, having birthday parties, not believing that the children will grow up, move away. And even then, she will see them there, “like a lot of dear little ghosts."

"Back when the children were still there Alison somehow never envisaged a time when they would not be. Oh, she knew it would come—but she never considered the implications, tried out the idea of an emptied house, listened for silence. They went gradually, of course, so silence came gradually, and there were returns […]. She has got used to it. You can get used to much—she has known that for a long while."

And there is the innocence of childhood, the seasons of the home being so natural – big kitchen table with 3 course home-cooked meals, the crowded house, play in the basement, everyone having their special place at the table, picnics outside, with again a lot of home-cooked tasty food, the unquestioned sense of belonging which becomes child’s reality. This innocence is presented so tenderly, as a frame, and with adulthood you learn to see beyond it.

"The garden swings grow moss; the sandbox is buried in dead leaves. It is all right, it is fine, everything is as it ever was, except different. Alison has faced down the passage of time, and emerged, if not triumphant, then afloat, on course."

Allersmead embodies their childhood, home, and memories. Every family has a secret – from each other, from the world, secrets they know about, but they don’t say it.

"The house knows, and is silent, locking away what has been done and said and thought. No one quite remembers anymore how they know, it is as though the knowledge was not suppressed but arrived through some osmotic process, absorbed from Allersmead daily life, an insidious understanding that seeped from person to person."

One day, they talk about it as casually as possible, around a cup of coffee. Just so you know, I knew.

"Not that there were conversations, exchanges, comments. No one has wished to discuss it; if ever the facts of the matter seemed to smolder dangerously, there would be a concerted move to stamp out the embers, to move away, to find safe territory elsewhere."

There are grownups - a mother, a father, an au pair.

"I see three people for whom things had gone dramatically wrong, who probably should never have been together anyway. I see them muddling on, because no one could face up to doing otherwise. Condemned to cohabitation."

And there he is, a husband, seldomly seen as dad, even maybe never seen as husband.

"He looks at her over his glasses, finger in the book. 'Why what?'
'Why did we get married?'
A brief silence.
'I seem to recall you were pregnant.'
'Oh, of course,' says Alison. 'I knew there was something.' She gets into bed, the tears rolling once more."

He is simply there, in his study room, with the door closed saving him “from excessive proximity”.

"But that Dad carried weight, way back. Oh dear me, yes. His tongue could scorch; he could make you feel more inadequate than you already knew that you were. The way he always won an argument, produced the definitive put-down. His scrutiny of a school report, handed back in meaningful silence."

Lively isn't an emotional writer in a sense that she leaves that to you to interpret however you want. And she is an author I would want to revisit once in a while.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those cases where many things that normally annoy me in books were forgiven because I liked the writing. Not so much a story as a character sketch of a family and its members, Family Album reads like a series of snapshots. Distant, self-absorbed Charles is married to Allison, a mom on steroids if there ever was one, raising her large brood of six children. The au pair, Ingrid, has been present since the children's babyhood and mysteriously never left, even though all the children have grown up and left home. Despite (or maybe because of) Allison's overinvestment in raising a Happy Family at all costs, Paul has a history of drug addiction and is largely unsuccessful while the other adult children, though far more successful than Paul, are spread all over the globe and not particularly connected to their family of origin. There is also a Family Secret which gradually unfolds over the course of the book.

This is a situation and not a story, with frequently shifting viewpoints and little plot. I'm normally pretty critical of books like these, but somehow this one worked for me. I loved the writing, which managed to keep me interested in the book despite its flaws. I also find that whereas books describing situations often tend to be burdened with excessive detail, here the details were well-chosen and sparing and Penelope Lively never spent too much time on any one character or event. So though there wasn't much of a plot, the book somehow moved and you never felt like you were wading through mud.

This book is clearly not for everyone but I found it a pleasant and enjoyable read.

[Sonia Gomes · Rating 1 out of 5]

The one word that comes to my mind as I rush through this book, I just want nothing more to do with it, 'Verbose.'

Followed by 'How exceptionally boring'

A surprise thought 'Was this book really a contender for the Booker Prize?'

And at long last, not this author ever again...

And as an after thought, 'Lively? You must be joking.'

[Yulia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmm, did I miss something? Because I didn't find this novel "quietly devastating," as the NY Times reviewer called it: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/boo... Rather, I found it plodding and very staged. Perhaps I'm inured by too many memoirs of dramatic domestic dysfunction. I was sincerely moved by the chapter narrated by the eldest son, Paul, and surprised by the empathy Lively shows each of her characters, but it amounts to little more than a collection of roughly drawn character studies.

[Bidisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating 3.9/5

Atmospheric - the applicability of this word was proving to be difficult for me to grasp until I grabbed Dame Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger. It was resplendent with nostalgia and memory. Now, I am not aware if memory-fiction is a thing (yes, yes, I say this despite Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending), but if it is, Dame Penelope Lively's books fit the bill. Family Album, like her former stated piece, is memory-fiction again, but with satiable augments.
**
A large family of nine, of varying age groups, remember incidents of their formative years from a perspective suitable to their persona. Recollections of each member to snatches of something as banal as a nursery rhyme or shredded manuscript drafts, sets the tone of their future dealings and decisions. In this short book of barely 260-odd pages, the portrayal of family life is as laconic as it is intense. The majestically described shabby family home, Allersmead, forms an apt setting for this large family.
Stunning and observant, would be my shorter review!

If you are looking for a book with peaks, climbs and downfalls, this is not it. Family Album is linear; there are memories and remembrances, and that's that.

I am now keen to pick my third Lively!

[Caleb · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's rare that I give up on a book. I managed to plod through to the end of this blunder of a read, but for naught. The only properly developed character was the house, thus the title should have been "Allersmead." If it had been, I might have known to skip it. It was a pained experience from which I learned nothing and enjoyed little.

[Paul Curd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Family Albumis the sixteenth novel Penelope Lively has written for adults. As the title suggests, it is a series of snapshots, episodes from the life of an upper middle class family. Charles, the father, is a writer who, it seems, never wanted marriage and children and who spends the majority of his time hidden away in his study, working on his next book. His wife, Alison, was the original 1960s Earth Mother whose whole life revolved around having and bringing up children. The children have all, unfortunately for Alison, now grown up. And then there's Ingrid, the Scandinavian au pair, still there after all these years. One wonders why.

There are six children. As the novel opens, they are all grown, and all bar Paul, the eldest and Alison's undisguised favourite, have flown the nest. From afar, they remember snapshots from their childhood, but everyone has a slightly different angle on the past, a different version of the family's history. Alison believes she was the perfect mother and that each of the children enjoyed a perfect upbringing in a perfect environment. Charles seems to contradict her with his sarcastic comments and Ingrid keeps her views to herself, but it is only Allersmead, the family home, that sees the complete picture, knows the whole story.

Like any family, there are secrets no one talks about. What really happened to Gina in the pond on her eighth birthday? What went on downstairs in the cellar game, with its Forfits [sic] and Penalties? Why is the au pair still there years after the children have grown? And why did she disappear for so long when the children were still so young? You can probably guess.

The way Lively illustrates the dynamics between the different members of the family at Allersmead is certainly the strong point of the novel. And, up to a point, the characterisation is equally strong. The point, though, is that there are almost too many characters for such a slim volume to fully explore. Half of the children are well drawn while the other (younger) half are just there in the background, never quite fully-forming on the page. Peripheral observers, like Charles' sister Corinna and her husband, are simply there to give a different point of view. Even the house in which the family lived, Allersmead, which is intended to be a character in its own right, never quite makes it convincingly enough. For me, the brushstrokes are too broad, too impressionistic. And then when the secrets are revealed, they are less shocking than I imagine the author intended. Some are predictable, others simply anticlimactic (several times I thought, is that it?)

One of the children, Roger, says to his wife (who finds the family 'exotic'), 'We were middle England, to the core. There are thousands and thousands of households like Allersmead.' But then he thinks that might be so. He was right first time.

I have to confess I 'discovered' Penelope Lively late. For some reason, I always thought I wouldn't like her writing, but I was completely entranced and emotionally moved by her previous offering. Ultimately, though, I found this book something of an anticlimax.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a stroke of luck. Had in the back of my mind to get round to reading some Penelope Mortimer and browsing the selection in the Wilmette library secondhand store I picked this up by mistake. The wrong Penelope. But it had a reassuring 'NY Times Notable book of the Year' sticker on the cover and after a quick google search told me she was a past Booker winner, I decided to give this a read. And how brilliant was it? Very, very. The story of a large family, six siblings all told from their different viewpoints from varying points in time. Cleverly constructed so you get hints of things that happened in the past, hearing about the fallout and then it cuts back so details are revealed. And then a different sibling has a different take. Its such a great portrayal of a large, dysfunctional (aren't we all) family. I'm so thrilled I made this error and discovered an excellent writer. Very English in the best sense.

[Ginger Bensman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Penelope Lively's books are always a pleasure. This one, written about a large family (six children) who grow up in a huge and rambling turn-of-the-century house, is a prismatic glimpse into the experience of each of the characters (the children, parents, and the au pair). The upshot, at least for me, is that memory is potent and highly individual. An experience may be shared, but each participant can come away from it with a profoundly different perspective, and those perspectives will likely shape their lives and world view in radically different ways. No two (or three or four) siblings experience their childhood in exactly the same way.

[Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only other Lively experience was How It All Began, her latest, which I LOVED. This was different, more sombre and more conventional. The story of a family -- mother, father, six now-grown kids, and the au pair who never left. The main conceit of the book is that families are not what they seem. That's not exactly a stunning revelation, but this secret is interestingly juicy. And Lively is great both on dialogue and on the intricacies of how people relate to one another. I thought the most interesting part of the novel was the way that Alison, the mother, understood family and her role within it. She had the husband and thus the money to allow family to be her everything. But that meant making a lot of sacrifices (and turning many a blind eye) when things didn''t turn out quite as she had planned. I also loved the relationship between Corinna and Martin (husband's sister and her partner, both academics) and the husband, a writer of more popular non-fiction. Lively absolutely nailed the disdain that each had for the other.

[Ann Douglas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully structured novel about an ordinary family that is living with a rather extraordinary secret. Features well-developed characters and multiple points-of-view. An engaging and worthwhile read.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another wonderful novel from Penelope Lively, about family dysfunction at its finest, but resilience too. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

[Connie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This family story reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, although Woolf wrote a masterpiece, inspired by her mother and father and summer days spent with a large brood of children in their rented holiday home in Cornwall. Like Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay, Alison is the unstoppable maternal force at the centre of the family holding it all together and Allersmead is the grand old-fashioned house where she presides. Like Mrs Ramsay, Allison is the kind of mother who is the “Angel of the House”, a Victorian ideal of motherhood. There are differences between the two mothers, but their constant focus is on their children. The fathers are writers who wall themselves off in their studies from family life and remain largely uninvolved with their children. Alison’s passionate attachment to her young children stirred my own nostalgia for those days. Children grow up, scatter, and the shabby family home is sold to the highest bidder and then likely renovated beyond recognition.Time moves on and Allison adjusts, sort of, and the adult children share sometimes differing views of their parents and their childhood. Readers will likely have very different responses to Allison. In the end, I respected her without ever wanting to be like her.

[Bookmarks Magazine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although most critics acknowledged that Family Album was not her best work, they thoroughly enjoyed Lively's latest tale of middle-class family dysfunction, a theme that fans will recognize from earlier novels. Lively is particularly skilled at exploring the small, seemingly inconsequential details of domestic life with an authenticity that will have readers cringing with empathy. There is a foreshadowed family secret that comes to light more than halfway through the novel: it's effective, but not as dark and foreboding as a weary reader might be expecting. On the technical side, several reviewers were distracted by Lively's constant mixing of first and third person narratives and past and present tenses. So you'll have to pay attention. Nevertheless, Family Album was considered an entertaining, highly readable addition to Lively's venerable body of work. This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Peter Allum · Rating 2 out of 5]

My reading of this novel was inspired by an FT interview with Lively. The novel describes an eccentric, large English family. One key theme is that, despite living together and knowing each other "inside out", the family don't really know each other at all, in the deepest sense. This point is well made, but then unnecessarily repeated several times in the novel.

The description of the coming-of-age of the six children in the family seems rather mechanistic, with the eventual career of each glimpsed in earlier passions. To this extent, the novel seems overly "tidy" with little room for quirks of fate. While a gripping read, I found it a little too "English" for my taste--too focused on the compromises of living in a society rather than on issues of individual psychology.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Penelope Lively is a master of misdirection. Family Album tells the story of a family that includes six children, in which the house they grow up in is as much a character as any of the humans. The narrative is supplied by each family member as well as others close to them, rendering each as a distinct personality, transitioning between past and present smoothly and distinctly. Information is hinted at, revealed sparingly and all in good time. Like every family that ever existed, this family harbors secrets, but it is not those secrets that are as important as the motivation behind them and their ultimate effect on each member. Highly recommended.

[Carey · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book in the mould of Annie Tyler et al, beautifully and skillfully written but ultimately pretty boring. The continual shifting of the narrative voice got a bit tiresome and the BIG secret was pretty unimpressive. I find these books about boring middle-class life just that - boring.

[Ron Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Penelope Lively's new novel comes wrapped as a celebration of old-fashioned domestic joy, with its heartwarming title, "Family Album," elegantly embroidered on the dust jacket. But be careful; she's left her needle in the cloth. It's a typical move for this old master, who frequently writes about sharp objects buried in our sepia-toned past. Although this little book can't compete with her Booker-winning "Moon Tiger" or her fictionalized anti-memoir "Consequences," it's another winning demonstration of her wit; every wry laugh is the sound of a little hope being strangled.

The story opens in the almost-present and revolves around a family raised in an English house called Allersmead. "A big house," Lively tells us. "A house from the days when people -- a kind of person -- assumed a big house." The six children are grown and, mostly, gone now, but Charles, their scholarly father, remains along with Alison, their indomitably cheerful mother, who still maintains the house as "a shrine to family . . . happy, smiling faces preserved on mantelpieces and windowsills, on the piano, framed on walls."

The family's "au pair girl" still lives in the house, too, which seems odd if you think about it, because there haven't been any children in the house for years, and this au pair is hardly a "girl" anymore.

But this is largely a story about not asking those awkward questions. It's about the way a large family races along with all the business of growing up and getting everybody fed and clothed and through school and then off to lives of their own. Except for the eldest, of course -- "Things so often haven't worked out for him" -- but best not to ask about that, either.

In 16 distinct chapters, from various, smoothly spliced points of view, Lively moves back and forth through the family's history, filling in events that explain apparently casual references: that faint scar on Sister's face, the time Dad's manuscript got cut to ribbons, that scary game in the cellar. "Inevitable glitches," their mother says lightly. "You remember the good times only." But that, it turns out, isn't really a pleasant observation so much as a command that requires constant vigilance to enforce. "Allersmead is a kind of glowing archetypal hearth," Lively notes, and this uber-mother "is its guardian."

The success of these chapters is uneven, but several of them are brilliant, full of glancing humor and spot-on truths about the way families maintain the peace through a process of willful ignorance and disciplined forgetfulness.

"There was something stalking around," thinks one of the now-grown siblings, "something uncomfortable, like shadows outside the window on a dark night, but not that, something inside the house." We recognize that ominous language: It's what we get just before a classic Suddenly Unrepressed Incest Flashback (SUIF). But it's a feint: No one was raped in the cellar; the girls weren't cutting themselves; the boys didn't skin a homeless man alive. Lively is interested in far subtler, more universal tensions of family life.

There is one deliciously shocking sexual transgression, and it leaves a permanent effect on the family, but Lively refuses us any details, and for the longest time it floats outside the boundaries of the novel. In a sense, she turns us into another family friend who can't quite believe they're all going about their lives as though nothing incredibly weird happened here. One of the siblings explains, "It was never mentioned." Yes, it was a fact, "but a submerged one."

"The important thing was for people to grow up in this lovely big family and a lovely home," their mother almost screams during Christmas dinner, "and that always came first, whatever, one's own concerns were neither here nor there."

Allersmead has been a stage upon which Alison's happy vision could be acted out -- no matter what. A masterful early chapter called "Gina's Birthday Party" never deviates from the usual goings-on: a "garden running with children," "tiny iced cakes in frilly cups," a treasure hunt in full play. But how slyly it reveals the withering disagreements and loneliness that lurk beneath the surface of this marriage. Alison's husband "stands beside her, looking somehow entirely detached, as though none of this were anything much to do with him, as though he had merely strayed upon the scene." Snobby and distant even to his wife, he's not an easy character to like. His lovely children recognize his familiar "expression of contained endurance." The closest Alison comes to telling him off is when she dares to enter his study and observes, "I have children. And you have books."

This seems at first like a scathing feminist critique of family dynamics in the 1970s, but Lively doesn't take sides, and there's something repellant about Alison's happiness, which grows like kudzu over the whole house, threatening to choke out any other mood. In later years, she offers classes in "Mothercraft." Could you live, forever, with a woman who "wakes thinking about a recipe for baked lemon chicken"?

Short as the novel is, though, it flags toward the end. Of the six siblings, only the eldest -- tragic Paul, chronically unemployed, alcoholic, poisoned by his mother's favoritism and his father's sarcasm -- is fully engaging. And the final chapter, a rather too-hip dialogue of e-mail messages, sounds false in a way that nothing else in "Family Album" does.

But as the holidays approach, this might be just the novel to inoculate yourself against all the maniacal gaiety of the season. As one character notes, "Any family is intriguing, if you look closely." Lively knows that the way families avoid looking closely is intriguing, too.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/20...

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely story about a large English family headed by a mother kind of crazy about children and cooking, a distant father, and an enigmatic Scandinavian au pair who stayed for decades. Mostly, from the perspective of the six kids, both while growing up and afterwards, as adults. Lively really nails family relationships, how memories differ among participants of the same events, and what people know and don’t know about other family members.

Listened to the audiobook, fine narration by Josephine Bailey.

[Maluquinha dos livros · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

Gostei muito da escrita e fiquei curiosa para ler outros livros desta autora.
Neste, conhecemos uma família numerosa, as suas diferenças, os seus segredos, e a forma como cada filho segue o seu percurso - afinal, entre tantos irmãos não deveria haver mais união? Ou foi o facto de crescer numa família tão grande que acaba por os afastar? Gostei desta questão. No entanto, achei que algumas partes podiam ter sido mais exploradas e que outras acabam por ser pouco importantes para o desenrolar da história.

[Ans Seriese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heerlijk en extreem Engels boek, met echo’s van Virginia Woolf en A.S. Byatt. Groot disfunctioneel gezin, “verhaal” wisselend verteld vanuit de perspectieven van alle (9) gezinsleden. Mooie taal ook. En food for thought: wat weet je van elkaar, van broers, zussen, ouders, die je toch zo goed denkt te kennen.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this novel by Lively, until i came to the end which I found really disappointing. I suppose she was attempting to tie up everything and demonstrate how each of the siblings moved on after the father's passing, but I still felt a big let-down. Otherwise this book would have received a five-star rating instead of only four starts.

As the novel opens, we are introduced to a quirky family, headed by a father who writes books and stays in his study much of the time. The big old house in which the family resides almost has a character of its own, and is the seat of most of the action. There are six children in this family, one of which, the youngest, doesn't have the same mother as the rest. The children are very different from one another, and each has his or her own traits and interests - all the characters are very well-drawn. As time goes on we begin to learn a secret that the parents believe they've kept hidden from the children but actually the children had figured it out a long time ago.

Coincidentally, I was reading "Nothing to be Frightened Of" (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29...) by Julian Barnes at the same time I was reading this novel, and both focus on how memory can deceive us and how one person's memory of an event can differ greatly from another witness's memory. I found really interesting how the children of this large family each had differing memories of the same childhood events and how each had internalized his or her emotional reactions and kept some of these feelings hidden from both the others and from themselves.

I would definitely recommend this book for fans of Lively's and for those readers who enjoy a detailed story that goes deeper than its surface might indicate.

[Kiwiflora · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, two Penelope Lively books in as many months! This woman is such a great writer, weaving her characters - all from the same family of course - with each other, casting different interpretations on the same events, relating past events to present situations. She weaves a delicious web; slowly, gently uncovering the mysteries and things that happen in families, all under the veneer and appearance of everything being 'normal'.

In this little gem, the children, all six of them, are returning to the family home, Allersmead - a large and rambling, run down suburban house, perfect for a large family and extras. The parents are Charles and Alison, respectively a successful but reclusive anthropology writer, and a mother, a domestic goddess actually, devoted to the provision of food, beautiful food and plenty of it for her family.

In a family of this size, naturally, the personalities are very diverse and the interactions and relationships between all of them just as interesting diverse. Naturally too there are secrets which Penelope Lively unfolds and discloses in such a gentle and intricate way. The biggest secret of all becomes fairly obvious soon enough in the story, but the unfolding and acceptance of the situation is just so beautifully handled that it all just seems like the most natural thing in the world.

I loved the characters, all of them, and just like real humans they are likable and unlikable with their good and bad points. I loved the writing and the unfolding of the story and the way the relationships develop and work. All in the name of family love. Wonderful and inspiring.

[DubaiReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Astutely written.

This was an interesting study of a large family in rural England, living in an old, crumbling mansion. I loved the earth mother, Alison, devoted to her children, whose only aim in life was to be matriarch to a large family.
Her husband, Charles, was a somewhat cliched version of the distant father, surrounded by constant noise and hubbub, yet almost unaware of it. Somewhat ironically, he was an anthropologist, studying the interactions of distant societies and how they raised their children.

The six children also had the support of Ingrid, an au pair, who had been with the family for years and still remained, even after all the children had left.
This is a largely character driven novel, with the old house, Allersmead, looming large in the background.
Each person has a chapter of their own, providing back-story and further details, but do we really need quite so much information? As an audiobook, it was a bit confusing and I would probably have awarded an extra star if I'd been reading it rather than listening, simply because of the complexity of the family relationships.

As the, now adult, children come home to visit Ingrid and their parents, we start to see the flaws in the family dynamics. In addition, we are drawn forward by the knowledge that there is a family secret to eventually be revealed.
Not a gripping story but entertaining for the astute observations that Ms Lively provides. We are the fly on the wall as these nine people interact through the years.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a story of a woman who set out to create and maintain a happy family. She glosses over and tries to contain the chaos and underlying misery of her large, boisterous clan while her husband retreats into his intellectual world behind the doors of his study, or into his mind at the dinner table - rarely interacting with his children or wife. This couple is a colossal mismatch, and there is also a fifth wheel who lives with them, and is at the heart of the family secret. This short novel is filled with complex characters, and, as always, they are well-drawn by Lively. The shifting point of view can be a bit disconcerting - the voice even changes within each chapter spoken by a particular character - wonder if that was intentional or missed by the editor. Not my favorite Lively book (I think Consequences is), but still recommend, especially if you come from a big family. People often assume a closeness, or kind of unity, and similarity among siblings in a big family, and I think this book gives the lie to that.

[Donald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Being the eldest of six children, like the family here, I thought that I would read this as my first Penelope Lively novel. Right from the start, I was not sure that I liked her writing style, perhaps a little too descriptive. But then she settled into the personalities and it began holding my interest somewhat better. It started waning again though and I found myself speed reading through several portions. Once I did finish, I was surprised that the ending elicited a tear from me, hence the three stars.

[mimi (depression slump) · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you’re looking for your next, compelling reading, one that will keep you hooked till the last page, dreading to know what is the point of trash-talking you’re family if not for a very good reason… look somewhere else.

The funny thing is the way the author tries in every possible way to make this family sound like horrible people who cheat and lie and don't call back their mom, and what the reader perceives is a normal family made by normal people whose sin is to spend their summer in a big house in another town.

↠ 2 stars