Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel

Customer Reviews:

amazing, amazing, amazing

By Patricia O'Tuama "rissa" - August 7, 1998

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I've been carrying it around with me, showing to all my friends and recommending that they read it, too. It's magical, magnificent, a very great, important piece of writing. Although the story revolves around Ruby and her family, the lives of her maternal great-grandmother, grandmother and mother are woven into the story so that in effect, the there two books here: Ruby and pre-Ruby. Several reviewers have described this novel as "one of the funniest books to come out of Britain in years (The NY Times Book Review) and as "comic" (Boston Sunday Globe) and while Behind the Scenes is enormously charming, inventive and endearing, don't buy this expecting it to be a funny or humorous book. At times it is unbearably sad, sadness tinged with dark scamperings of horror. I was telling my husband about this book and he kept saying, "this sounds awful, terrible things keep happening to these people," ! and while... read more

The real imaginary world of Ruby Lennox

By Grady Harp - October 15, 2002

Friends sharing books they love usually means you're in for a treat. Thanks, Anya! BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM is a total triumph of a book. Voted a Whitbread Book of the Year when published in 1995 this extraordinarily entertaining novel was the first novel by Kate Atkinson and she surely knows her stuff. Not only is the writing of the first caliber, but the technique of storytelling is invigorating and fun and warm and tragic and in short, about as fine a coming of age novel as anyone has written.Ruby Lennox narrates this delectable tale of her life in a dysfunctional geneology from the point of her conception ( thoroughly entertaining view of life from within the uterus) through her childhood and young adulthood up to the age of 41. Atkinson divides her book into Chapters and Footnotes: the Chapters are the chronological tale of the wonderfully crazy Ruby and her sisters and bizarre mother and father and the Footnotes after each chapter explore the history of her... read more

Exhibit A: Family Secrets

By paisleymonsoon - May 18, 2003

When you see the title of this book, you immediately come to the conclusion that this book must be about a little girl who's family owns a museum. This museum turns out to be just like the museum that YOUR OWN family owns. Exhibits at the "Lennox family museum" include:
A. A pink, daisy-shaped, glass button
B. A lucky rabbit's foot
C. A George VI coronation teaspoon
D. A bright, artificial smile
E. Bunty's unbearably sad childhood
F. Rabbit-shaped clouds hanging in the sky like zepplins
G. "Mind your boots, Lily"
H. A plane in a death spin
I. Your sister says not to worry
J. The silver locket
K. Thinking about homeStrange exhibits for a museum, don't you think?These "exhibits" are simply items and memories belonging to several generations of the Lennox family. Each "exhibit" carries with it a history and a memory that the casual onlooker cannot fathom. Some people, like Ruby Lennox, feel that "the past... read more