Family History

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Author(s):

DANI SHAPIRO

Binding: Hardcover
Format(s): Bargain Price
List Price: $23.00

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

From the author of the best-selling memoir Slow Motion (?Chilling . . . her vision is unblinking??New York Times Book Review; ?Riveting . . . a breathtaking combination of candor and bravado??San Francisco Chronicle), a ferociously paced new novel about a woman losing control of her life, her marriage, and her kids, and discovering that you can do everything right and still find the world you?ve made slipping away.
Rachel Jensen has it all: a husband she adores, challenging work in art restoration, a terrific teenage daughter, and a new baby on the way. Then her infant son is injured in an accident in her daughter?s arms, and that accident begets a terrifying lie. Set in a small Massachusetts town, Family History is about a family spiraling toward disintegration, the terrible force of guilt in children, and a mother?s nightmarish realization that she cannot protect her own child.

As the life the Jensens have so carefully built begins its slow collapse, we see with excruciating clarity the frailty of our strongest allegiances and the precarious ledge upon which our most vital relations?marriage, parenthood?are balanced. Family History blazes through this intimate and highly charged territory with stunning velocity, and marks a bold new step forward for the prodigiously gifted Dani Shapiro.

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

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.

Terrific book

This book held me mesmerized throughout as a parent who knows you can do all you do and still life doesn't stay perfect. The heartbreak of parenting is exhibited so well in this book. You want things to work out for them.

A Searingly Important Book

Family History is not only beautifully written, it is a searingly accurate look at life inside a troubled family. There are no cliche's or easy answers provided to the reader. As a psychotherapist who has worked extensively with families in pain, I can tell you that this story goes straight to the core of the nearly impossible task of being the parent your child wishes you to be. It will stay with you long after you have finished reading it.

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