From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The ease with which British journalist Cadwalladr spins three generational tales in her debut is outdone only by the grace and wit with which she delivers each one. Set in late–20th-century Britain, the novel is narrated by Rebecca Monroe, a pop culture researcher who tells of her marriage to Alistair, a behavioral geneticist; her childhood leading up to her mother's suicide; and her grandmother's doomed biracial romance with Cecil, a Jamaican immigrant. In an effort to better understand herself, the child she can't decide whether or not to have, and the people she still can't believe make up her family, Rebecca considers both sides of the nature/nurture debate, with any romantic notions she might be on the brink of reaching debunked by her husband's passionless scientific postulations. Cadwalladr explicates her tale with a slew of definitions, scientific charts and graphs, detailed family anatomies, examples of deductive fallacies and footnotes expounding on such essential '70s pop culture references as
Dallas and
The Sale of the Century. Her mastery of time and place, wry humor and sporadic bouts of self-doubt will endear her to readers, while her fascination with the choices people make combined with a morbid curiosity about her own fate add depth and texture to this utterly winning tale of one lovable, dysfunctional family.
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From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–While working on her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, Rebecca Monroe, the wry narrator and central character in this engrossing debut novel, grapples with the nature versus nurture debate. Her husband is a behavioral geneticist who is certain he knows the answer–it's in the genes. But as Rebecca explores her grandparents' relationship, her findings take off in surprising directions. She interweaves the stories of three generations of her relatives from the 1940s, the 1970s, and the present to show a bleakly funny, unsentimental view of an English family unraveling and then coming together. Rebecca gives insight into her childhood by sprinkling her story with cultural references such as the TV series
Dallas and
Charlie's Angels, explaining them with hilarious footnotes. She uses charts and graphs to show aspects of genetics and kinship, giving a sense of order and tidiness to the unreliable and sometimes messy world of human relations. The novel is well paced and the story is compelling, with vivid characters, especially the women. The author makes sense of the tangled ties among the generations and navigates them with humor and compassion, as she does the themes of racism, mental illness, marriage, and, of course, nature versus nurture.
–Susanne Bardelson, Kitsap Regional Library, WA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
