Behind the Scenes at the Museum FROM THE PUBLISHER
In her profoundly moving, uniquely comic debut, Kate Atkinson introduces readers to the mind and world of Ruby Lennox, born above a pet shop in York at the halfway point of the twentieth century, and determined to understand both the family that precedes her and the life that awaits her. Taking her own conception as her starting point, the irrepressible Ruby narrates a story of four generations of women, from her great-grandmother's affair with a French photographer, to her mother's unfulfilled dreams of Hollywood glamour, to her young sister's efforts to upstage the Queen on Coronation Day. Hurtling in and out of both World Wars, economic downfalls, the onset of the permissive '60s, and up to the present day, Ruby paints a rich and vivid portrait of family heartbreak and happiness.
FROM THE CRITICS
Fiction Digest
From the moment Ruby Lennox announces her own conception with the shout, "I exist!"—an event she attributes to the five pints of bitter her father drank—it is clear she won't leave anything out of the account of her Yorkshire family. She describes her great-grandmother's affair with a French photographer, her mother's dashed dreams of Hollywood glamor and her sister's unsuccessful attempt to upstage the queen of England. A first novel.
Synopsis copyright Fiction Digest
Megan Harlan
In her offbeat, playful, and often poignant first novel, the young British writer Kate Atkinson
offers us the voice of a jubilant, irreverent narrator, Ruby Lennox, who at once celebrates and
mercilessly skewers her middle-class English family. From the moment of her conception in
York in 1951 (the novel is smartly launched with the exclamation, "I
exist!"), Ruby casts a frank and omniscient eye on her disjointed clan,
viewing with growing alarm her distant, philandering father George, her
profoundly irritable mother Bunty, and her two emotionally overwhelmed
sisters. Life for the Lennox clan revolves around the family petshop, the
occasional tragedy (such as when the petshop burns down), and visits
with a bevy of eccentric relatives. Atkinson, who has won the UK's
prestigious Ian St. James Award for her short stories, seamlessly
alternates this normal, workaday world with darker family secrets --
including an odd "feeling of something long forgotten" that will haunt
Ruby throughout her life.
Through a series of lengthy "footnotes" that follow each chapter, Atkinson also recounts tales
drawn from over a century of the family's history -- tracing the passage of oddities and flawed
traits from one generation to the next. A few of these work as colorful snapshots, as when
Ruby's great-grandmother runs away with a French magician, or when we learn that the
Second World War, for Bunty, was not so much a matter of getting a husband as acquiring a
personality. But the majority of the tales (such as the one in which her grandmother buys new
boots after the Boer War), do little to illuminate the more compelling modern-day narrative.
Worse still, they lack Ruby's clever voice. In the end, Atkinson is so successful in creating her
wry, witty central character that any other perspective seems like a digression we don't want to
follow. -- Salon
Hilary Mantel
"Delivers its jokes and tradgedies as efficiently as Dickens once delivered his, though Atkinson has a gameplan more sophisticated than Dickens....will dazzle readers for years to come." - The Long Review of Books
Ben MacIntyre
"Remarkable...full of the grimness, grit, and grandeur of Yorkshire life...one of the funnies books to come out of Britain in years." -- The New York Times Book Review
Georgia Jones-Davis
"Stunning...out Copperfield's David Copperfield's....The power has such storytelling, a treasure chest bursting with the painful, pitiful, sad, always fascinating details of the most ordinary of lives." -- The Los Angeles Times
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