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What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam (view source)
Revision as of 09:46, 20 March 2018
, 09:46, 20 March 2018no edit summary
{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=What the Family Needed
|author=Steven Amsterdam
|borrow=Maybe
|isbn=9781846555800
|pages=288
|publisher=Harvill Secker
|date=August 2012
|website=http://www.stevensamsterdam.com
|summary=Very much in the magical fiction genre, a family find that super-powers help them to cope with the ups and downs of life. Each chapter is good but the formulaic structure makes this less than the sum of its parts.
|cover=0099565935
|aznuk=0099565935
|aznus=B008I33Y68
}}
Steven Amsterdam's first novel [[Things We Didn''t See Coming by Steven Amsterdam|Things We Didn't See Coming'' ]] won several awards including The Guardian First Boom Award. His second book, ''What the Family Needed'', is similar in that it too contains a large dose of the strange, yet it doesn't quite work as well. The book is centred around the families of two sisters, with each member having their own chapter told at different stages of their lives. In each one the various family members are facing problems of some sort or other and each mysteriously achieves some sort of super-power that they 'need' to partly overcome these, although not always with the desired results. From early on, the reader suspects that Alek, elder sister Natalie's younger son who appears as an imaginative kid when we first meet him, is at the heart of the weirdness and sure enough he has the final chapter in the book. Just don't expect everything to be explained.
At first, I thought this was a book I was going to love. The first chapter features Giordana as a teenage girl on the day that her mother Rose left her drunken father to stay with Natalie's family. She is the first one to apparently develop a super-power. Young Alek asks her which she would prefer, to be able to fly or to be invisible. At the time this sounds like the imagination of a young boy's mind but she quickly finds that by concentrating she can indeed become invisible. It's the kind of magic that will appeal to fans of Audrey Niffenegger for example as she discovers that while there are some benefits, sometimes you don't want to hear what people are saying when you are not there.
The result is that while the individual chapters are entertaining, the book is strangely less than the sum of its parts and the author's structure is too evident throughout. Second books are notoriously tricky things though and Amsterdam remains an author to watch out for.
Our thanks to the kind people at Harvill Secker for sending us this book."
Fans of the more magical end of the fiction spectrum would be well advised to check out the terrific [[The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey]], or [[The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern]]. And if you haven't read [[The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger]] yet, what are you waiting for?
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