BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM by Kate Atkinson

I love Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie novels, but her other stuff, not so much.  This novel is narrated by Ruby Lennox and charts her life from conception, no less.  It also covers the lives of her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother, causing me much confusion as to which generation I was reading about.  In all honesty, I could never keep track of these various women’s siblings, except for those of Ruby herself.  Ruby is the youngest of three girls whose mother, Bunty, is not of the warm and fuzzy variety.  The previous generations of women have both brothers and sisters, some beloved, some not, some killed in action.  Ruby’s story is mostly an unhappy one, where one of the happier weeks of her life is one spent with her sisters at the shore with their father’s lover, of all people, as babysitter.  This book has some funny moments but mostly not.  In fact, it supports the argument that dysfunctional families beget dysfunctional families.  Arguably the saddest event in the novel involves animals, following the death of a family member, but Ruby is indeed a tragic character.  Although not physically abused, except perhaps by her vicious sister Gillian, she suffers emotional abuse that becomes even more evident in the last 50 pages of the book, which are by far the most enlightening, the most heartbreaking, and at the same time the most uplifting.  A startling revelation in this section delivers a blast of righteous indignation that stirred me to pop up out of my chair, almost.  It certainly explains Bunty’s lack of affection for Ruby, but it does not exonerate her for being such an emotionally distant mother.