Family History: A Novel

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Author(s):

Dani Shapiro

Label: Anchor
Publisher(s):

Anchor

Studio: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

From the prodigiously gifted author of the acclaimed memoir Slow Motion, a stunning and brutally honest novel about one family?s harrowing recovery from devastation.

Rachel Jensen is perfectly happy: in love with her husband, devoted to their daughter Kate, gratified by her work restoring art. And finally, she?s pregnant again. But as Rachel discovers, perfection can unravel in an instant. The summer she is thirteen, Kate returns from camp sullen, angry, and withdrawn. Everyone assures Rachel it?s typical adolescent angst. But then Kate has a terrifying accident with her infant brother, and the ensuing guilt brings forth a dreadful lie?one that ruptures their family, perhaps irrevocably. Family History is a mesmerizing journey through the mysteries of adolescent pain and family crisis.

Amazon.com Review

In Family History, Dani Shapiro has written such a nail biter of a plot that it's easy to overlook just how good--and how literary--a novel this really is. Narrator Rachel Jenson is a housewife and art restorer married to Ned, a one-time painter. They live with their two children, 13-year-old Kate and 2-year-old Josh, in the small New England town where Ned grew up. In an elegant series of flashbacks, we learn of the emotional devastation teenage Kate has wrought. She was a perfect child growing up, but once Josh came along, her dark thoughts and tragic actions nearly destroy her family. As secret after secret is revealed, Shapiro gets perfectly Rachel's horror of daily life: how can you chat with the other moms at preschool when your world is falling apart? But what makes Family History a fine novel is its utter freedom from stereotype. Kate is bad, but she's never the bad seed; Ned's a failure, but he's not a total wash; Rachel's a narrator mired in tragedy, but she's a wry, slightly unreliable narrator mired in tragedy. Shapiro knows just how much hope to give her characters. In the end, their redemption is so slight that we actually believe in it. --Claire Dederer

Customer Reviews

One of the best books I've ever read!

I am an English teacher and a book snob! If I read a chapter and I don't like what I'm reading, I can't go on. This book had me hooked. I could not put it down. It will be hard to find one to follow this!

Much left unexplained. SPOILERS!!!!!

I found this book to be a page turner in spite of the fact that it was so poorly layed out and the fact that it makes it look like girls that make accusations of sexual abuse are crazy and making it up. In this story a young and disturbed girl says that her father molested her. In the real world Ned (the father) would have been arrested and child protective services would have gotten involved. The author left all of that out. What happened the night Kate was watching her little brother? What became of the little brother. Was he damaged by his fall? Kate's story was not explored at all, just her bad behavior was described. I kept reading because I kept expecting something to be revealed at the last minute but it wasn't. It would have been a 5 star book to me if the author had just gone some where with the story.

Great Book!

You will not be able to put this book down! I highly recommend it. Shapiro is adept at getting inside people's minds. She illustrates well how a mother and father can honestly do their best to raise their children with love and understanding, only to be left feeling helpless when circumstances somewhat beyond their control threaten the very core of their family relationships.

Disappointed

First the negative stuff: I found many things wrong with this book. The voice of the narrator first and foremost. She's a first-class navel gazer, a whiner. The writer could only have made her more of a soap opera heroine by adding "Alas!" to her vocabularly. The protagonist does a lot of emoting which becomes tedious.

In fact most of the characters are tedious and overwrought. They sob uncontrollably, they gasp, they choke on tears, they run screaming out of rooms. Because they're always in the throes of despair, their despair, when actually warranted, is ineffective. And the characters, because of their constant emoting, become unlikable (and in this genre, that's hardly a good thing).

In terms of story, I would have preferred a lot less melodrama and a lot more information about the daughter's mental illness----or at the very least, the parents ASKING more about it. For people so overwrought, they both seem so incurious, it's unnatural. Another unnatural reaction was to the husband's sexual indiscretion. It would seem to me that if you're going to write this in as one more cause of tension, it should go somewhere. Instead, by the time this "tidbit" was disclosed, I had the feeling that the author was just throwing stuff against the wall to see how much would stick.

And while this may sound like nit-picking, I turn off when writers overuse an adjective in order to elicit an emotion. In this case, "little". Joshie's little feet, his little head, his little toes....Enough with the preciousness already. Blech.

But it's not all bad. The plot, while predictable, moves along at a good pace. The author's prose is competent and trusthworthy. And as someone else mentioned above, this story put me in mind of A Map of the World, only not nearly as well crafted. So while it wasn't a waste of time, I would love to see this author get a do-over. This could have been a genuinely good book.

You can't wait to see what happens

The way the book starts, keeps you turning the pages and staying up late to see how in the world it got to that point. The plot could happen to any family as things keep spiraling out of control and you feel the mother's agony when she doesn't know what to do to help those she loves. I wish at the end of the book it would have given you a little more insight into the daughter. The book does reward though by giving you hope when it seems hopeless.

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