I must confess I purchased Behind the Scenes at the Museum thinking it was in one of my favorite genre: museum and art-related. However, it was not that at all, but I loved it, nonetheless.
The narrator, Ruby Lennox, starts her life at the moment of her conception in the 1950s, thus beginning a challenging family saga that covers four generations and two wars, and moves between past and present in search of the truth. Ruby’s life is rather bleak, but the tone of the book is light, often funny. Ruby’s mother and father dislike each other, while her sisters dislike her, each other, and their parents. The family is bound by generations of stories bordering on mythology. An amazing number of family members, in attempts to escape their disheartening family, vanish and are never heard from again. Her parents hoard deep, dark secrets from their children. What is unique (and which forms the museum portion of the book) is that objects have a secret history, which Ruby addresses in “footnotes” at the ends of chapters. Modern studies on emotions show that each time a person revisits a memory, they revise that memory based on their current life events, so memories are constantly changing rather than being immutable, and that is certainly evidenced in this novel.
Clever tricks of plotting twist the narrative like the double-helix of human DNA and knock the readers’ socks off. Behind the Scenes at the Museum is a complex, ingenious novel that challenges one’s perceptions of the definition of family.
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Behind the Scenes at the Museum (St. Martin’s Press, April 2, 2013) is available through:
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