Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Review of Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Behind the Scenes at the Museum
reviewed on + 188 more book reviews


Info on the book:
1995 Whitbread Book of the Year
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 adn the life that awaits her.
Taking her own conception as her starting point, the irrepressible Ruby narates a story of four generations of women, from her great-grandmother's affair with a French photographer, to her mother's unfulfilled dreams of Hollywod 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.