Changes

|title=What the Family Needed

|author=Steven Amsterdam

|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.

}}

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.