I was disappointed with this Penelope Lively. The action involves a family of two parents, six children and Ingrid, a long-standing mother's help. There are family secrets. Penelope Lively shows a family where the children are a unit, separate from their parents. They mostly leave home as soon as they can and just occasionally return, with the exception of the oldest, Paul, who struggles to hold down a job. The father is a shadowy figure, mostly in his study writing books. The mother and Ingrid spend all their hours in the kitchen and the garden. For the mother the family is everything. Only Gina, the second eldest, really comes alive at all for me. The adult children have a chapter and an internal monologue but so much of this has no depth. ( )

ReVisited November 2021
I got the audio version this time and still loved it. This is a book I read with my feelings, not with my thoughts. My favorite kind!

November 2021
Audio/Libby
Driving for FFE

2014:
Okay, perhaps five stars because this book was so ridiculously timely, what with me lately thinking about family and memory and the fantastic oddity of life. But five stars it is because for me, this book truly was Amazing.

I don't know how I'd even begin to describe Family Album, except to say that it really is rather like being privy to the meandering memories that pass through the minds of family members as they are gathered to flip through the family photo album. But that really isn't quite right at all, so perhaps I'd talk about Penelope Lively's amazing use of punctuation and sentence structure, and her gloriously diverse vocabulary. I had to use my dictionary quite a few times and that's a rarity for me. Meanings were always quite clear from context, and mostly I was intrigued by how certain words were employed, but there were also a few distinctly British words unfamiliar to me. Hurray for that!

If you have a family, or know any families, and you like words, and you like thinking about families and words - and memories - read this book. And if you have lots of siblings, read this book...and then call me up so we can sit down and talk about it. (And that invitation even includes my sisters.)
( )

Lovely story about a large English family headed by a mother kind of crazy about children and cooking, a distant father, and an enigmatic Scandinavian au pair who stayed for decades. Mostly, from the perspective of the six kids, both while growing up and afterwards, as adults. Lively really nails family relationships, how memories differ among participants of the same events, and what people know and don’t know about other family members.

Listened to the audiobook, fine narration by Josephine Bailey. ( )

Okay, a family with six children, an aloof father and a mother who seems almost obsessed with creating a facade of happy family life. Add an au-pair who never left the family, even when the children are grown up. And of course there is a dark family secret that is never mentioned, but everybody seems to know about it. Sounds interesting.
But I was disappointed by this book. The characters were stereotypical and missed depth. The constant changes of narrator and timeline made it impossible to get into the book, to identify oneself with one of the characters or even to care for one of them. The complex relationship between family members is not fully explained. A lot of questions remained without an answer.
The title of the novel was well chosen. The family is presented in snapshots of their life, it feels almost like skimming through an album of family pictures.
I liked the writing style, though. I will definately try another book by this author. Many of them got better reviews than this one. ( )

Uit de erfenis van ma. Een boeiend en goedgeschreven verhaal over 6 broers en zussen die zijn opgegroeid in een enorm huis. Ieder kind komt aan het woord en langzaam wordt het familiegeheim onthuld: de jongste zus is kind van de au pair (een halfzus). ( )