Family Album

What a wonderful novel. Every single detail is perfect, the story mysterious, the style restrained. This is a English Novel in the best sense of the term. A novel that must be read slowly. Highly recommend.

I absolutely loved this novel in every way. Lively is a master of the craft. The writing is stunning, the characters real and alive. So many small, fresh details that bring a character alive. I didn't want to finish this book it was such a wonderful read. Few authors are as perceptive and wise as Lively. The structure of the novel told in multiple points of view is perfect for the title, Family Album. Honestly, I have nothing negative to say. This book is a cherished gem in a year of disappointing reads from established writers. Buy it and enjoy!

British novelist Lively, winner of the Booker Prize (Moon Tiger) and an expert in the darkish art of domestic wit, celebrates big, happy families in her 22nd book. To matriarch Alison, family is, simply, what she lives for, even now that her six children have dispersed to distant parts and seldom return. The novel opens with one such return, however. Gina (second oldest), 39, brings her new boyfriend, Philip, to meet her parents and see her rather larger-than-life childhood setting, Allersmead. The house is a rambling Edwardian pile with seven bedrooms, presided over still by Alison, husband Charles and the Swedish au pair, Ingrid, who arrived 40 years before and has never left. "The kitchen was the heartland of Allersmead. Of course. That is so in any well-adjusted family home, and Allersmead was a shrine to family....There were children's drawings still tucked behind the crockery on the dresser, a painted papier-mâché tiger on a shelf, alongside a row of indeterminate clay animals that someone made earlier. There were named mugs slung from hooks: Paul, Gina, Sandra, Katie, Roger, Clare." Philip is intrigued, even a little envious, impressed by the many photos and mementos, the large garden, Alison's wonderful and abundant food, the idea of the family teeming over the place. "Gina continued to hear voices, her life was still flashing at her. It seemed odd that Philip could be impervious to this, that a person with whom one had become so absolutely intimate could be so perversely ignorant. Not know. Not see and hear. One is sealed off, she thought. So is he. So's everyone. No wonder there's mayhem." Her father, Charles, however, has made an art form out of sealing himself off from the mayhem. "Charles is immersed - in his train of thought, in the organization of words, of sentences. Time passes - but, for him, it seems to stand still. He looks out the window occasionally, unseeing, thoughts tumble in his head. He is elsewhere, inside his mind, in pursuit of an argument, a sequence." With the help of a small private income, Charles has devoted his life to writing books on any subject that captures his interest. The books are (or were) accessible and widely read, although not by anyone in his immediate family. His study seems an alien, sacrosanct territory inside the fecund chaos of the family manse. He emerges for meals, engages newcomers (like Philip) in arcane discussions, handles the finances. Alison does everything else. With Ingrid's somewhat implacable assistance. No one seems to know what Ingrid thinks, or ever thought, about anything, yet she is such an integral part of the family Allersmead cannot be imagined without her. Naturally there are secrets. What family doesn't have secrets? These begin to emerge after Gina and Philip depart for home and the novel proceeds from various points of view at various times over the last 40 years. Gina's 8th birthday, "of which everyone will remember something different." A summer holiday in Co

Six children, two parents and one nanny are all living together on a rambling British estate in the bucolic Thomas Hardy-esque countryside: nine different personalities and nine different ways of telling a story about one single family unit. FAMILY ALBUM illuminates the bold, forthright, secretive and sacred parts of life at Allersmead, where this clan has been seated throughout its entirety and the history that is about to change all their lives once it's revealed. Penelope Lively is a lovely British author --- and by lovely, I mean she is gentle with a turn of phrase, elegant in her descriptions and pointed but diplomatic towards all her characters, regardless of whether or not they are behaving themselves. Beginning at a later family get-together in which the eldest, Paul --- who has returned to the roost to work at a local garden center after disastrous attempts at being a drugged-out loser and a willing suicide victim --- smashes Alison's Limoges plates. As her complacent and seemingly zoned-out husband mutters dark words from one end of the table, Alison finds a way to overlook these sleights, these accidents, as she has spent decades overlooking everything from infidelity to drug use to bitter contempt and anger from any one of her offspring. And yet the entire book, mired as it could be in these nasty emotional climes, manages to move along in just the way you know Alison would like it to --- one thing leads pragmatically to another; one thought, one emotion, to another; one long elegant steppe of the little things that make up the larger family dynamic, years down the road. Lively's style is masterful not only in its literary sophistication but in its pointed use of narrative variety in telling the story. We do eventually get to peek in on each of the family members, getting a sense of how much they knew about what family secret at a particular time and how these past indiscretions or episodes shape or continue to shape the protagonist at hand. When Sarah moves to Rome to design and flip apartments to the rich and richer, she realizes that Italy's intense dedication to the family as an unbreakable unit helps her remember exactly why she has no interest in creating one herself --- her memories of her mother as a self-righteous housemarm is almost despicable to her, so she cannot see herself in this light at all. If there is a villain in the book, it would have to be Alison, the erstwhile career mom who tucked her offspring into this little place in order to keep them safe but control them as well. Lively does not make Alison the villain, but the secrets she kept and the choices she made reverberate in her children's lives in a way that they cannot help but express anger --- although they often express gratitude for her being there and for their general care as well. FAMILY ALBUM is a truly beautiful book about how the ways in which we grow up affect the ways in which we live as grown-ups. It is a classic story, told with great skill an

A family that has come undone. Alison and Charles the parents, Ingrid the au pair and the six children, Paul, Gina, Ralph, Sandra, Kate and Clare all live in the lovely old Edwardian home they call Allersmead. Penelope Lively has given us a story of the lives of these nine people and their perspectives of how events shaped their lives. We learn about the house, Allersmead, 'a gravelly drive, stone urns, lanky shrubs and, in the air, a redolent waft of hearty cooking.' Gina has come home to introduce her new love, Phillip to the family and vice versa. Alison, the mom, the earth mom, all she has wanted her entire life is to have children, and a husband, of course. Charles, the absent father, he lived in the house but he was absent emotionally and little is known about him. Ingrid, the Au pair, who lives happily with the family helping to raise the children and to organize the family. Paul, the oldest son is at home. He is his mother's favorite, but has never been able to do much with the life he was handed. Gina is a journalist who travels the world. She does not share much about her childhood, nor as we come to find out do the other children. There is something hidden, a secret that no one discusses. The children, all adults now, know about the secret, but it has never interfered with their lives, or so they thought. Alison, the mother is oblivious to any secret, her family is her all and be-all, and she does not recognize anything outside of her atmosphere. Charles is too busy with his research and writings to be bothered. Each member of the family discusses their points of view, alternating between the children and the adults. This is done in flashback, as they focus on what they remember. The children are gone, but there are no grandchildren, and we ponder why this is. As the events unfold, the secret is a vague consciousness as everyone circles the truth. There is no big event, it is the slow skillful manner in which Penelope Lively allows this to become devastating. Penelope Lively has become a favorite author. This new novel is not my favorite, but it kept me wrapped up in her reading for most of a day. Her manner with words and the development of her characters keep us on our toes. I love the fact that she involves us in her novels, we come to know the people and how they think and what they want in life. We can picture them in our mind's eye, and that, my dear friend, is what a great novel is all about. Highly Recommended. prisrob 11-28-09 Moon Tiger Consequences (Readers Circle Series) Making It Up