![]() ![]() Though the ``footnote'' entries are not quite as gripping as those rendered in Ruby's richly vernacular, energetic recitation, Atkinson's ebullient narrative style captures the troubled Lennox family with wit and poignant accuracy. I heard great things about the book and was excited to read it. (For example, a passage about a pink glass button reveals the story of its original owner, Ruby's great-grandmother Alice, who will abandon her young family and run off with a French magician.) Ruby's richly imagined account includes both the details of daily life and the several tragic events that punctuate the family's mundane existence. I really enjoyed this book, however, I expected to like it more. Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress. Through its ambitious structure, the novel also charts five generations and more than a century of Ruby's family history, as reported in ``footnotes'' that follow relevant chapters. ![]() Ruby has two older sisters, willful Gillian and melancholy Patricia. Her parents own a pet shop her mother, Bunty, bitterly rues having married her philandering husband, George, and daydreams about what her life might have been. ![]() ![]() Ruby Lennox is a quirky, complex character who relates the events of her life and those of her dysfunctional family with equal parts humor, fervor and candor-starting with her moment of conception in York, England, in 1959: ``I exist!'' Ruby then describes the family she is to join. The narrator's insistent voice and breezy delivery animates this enchanting first novel by a British writer who won one of the 1993 Ian St. ![]()
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