Vivienne Kelly

Isabel's life and her memories are pried open by her 12 year old granddaughter Sofie. Her relationships with the rest of her family are toxic and as Sophie begins to ask about her past, bringing out old wedding albums, prizing the scab off the past Isabel is forced to face the results of her actions.

Sophie is the neutral observer. She is not burdened by old animosities.

"One of the things Sophie has achieved by the very fact of her existence is to inject a little normality into her extended family. Split as we are by old histories, replete with enmities matured like ripened cheese, we gather at family occasions with an inbuilt propensity to eyeball each other across the room as if battlelines were about to be declared.

Sophie overcomes these divisions; she traverses the sharp and jagged crevices in our family landscape; she presents to us an image of ourselves as harmonious and ordinary. A regular family, a commonplace and unremarkable group of related people who don’t bicker and simmer, who don’t harbour fetid suspicions or implacable hostilities about each other. It isn’t a bit true, of course: we’re so lost in our dysfunction, so crabbed and twisted by it, that we’ll never emerge from it. It’s like an indelible dye: it’s imbued the fibre and substance of our relationships with its telltale stain.

So we’re a dysfunctional family: but then again, what’s dysfunction? Show me a functional family and I’ll show you a pack of poseurs and fibbers. Our dysfunction is at any rate remedied, if not completely repaired, by Sophie: it’s partly why she’s so important, so necessary."

Told entirely from Isabel's perspective, our perception of he and her family are coloured by Isabel's idea that non of this is her fault. She is self centered. Other people do not understand her. She is bewildered by the implacable hostility of her young son. She doesn't understand her daughter. Her older sister constantly criticises her. Her husband suffocates her with his constant need to look after her.

"Cooee, I cry, and again, in accelerating desperation. Cooee. No one answers; no one is there to answer; I am alone in the world. Fear possesses me utterly. I wake, weeping."

Into this bewildering world comes Max and that is where everything changes.

Sophie's questions and Isobel's inability to deal with the past honestly have dire consequences and nothing is as is seems.

Excellent book, I had to stay up late to finish it, just a bit more; what, she said what, where or how can this end?… (lisätietoja)