What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam

What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam
Buy What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: General Fiction
Reviewer: Robin Leggett
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.
Buy? Maybe	Borrow? Maybe
Pages: 288	Date: August 2012
Publisher: Harvill Secker
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781846555800
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Steven Amsterdam's first novel 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.

Many of the stories are bitter sweet. Some more than others contain wry humour and the mix of super- powers is a little strange in itself. In addition to invisibility and flying, those stock super-powers that most children imagine, another acquires the powers of cupid in being able to unite couples together, while another develops the power to swim very fast - which I'd imagine is terrifically useful if you are dolphin, but rather less useful for a human.

Each power is a metaphor for what the individual needs in their lives. The swimming power is acquired by Natalie who is struggling for strength against a sea of troubles caused by young Alek, while the person who is able to fly is grounded in life by the realities of being a stay at home father, unable to fly with his dreams. Yet when we meet him later, no reference is made to his experience. Mostly what the family members 'need' appears to be designed to keeping them together as a slightly dysfunctional family.

In many ways it reads like a collection of related short stories, with the same characters but at different points in their lives. This is partly my problem with the book. Although we move on in time, the characters who have had their chapters re-appear but don't seem to be the same people and certainly don't recall any of their strange adventures. This is sort of explained later on, but only sort of.

Mostly the irritation I had was that it is very formulaic in structure. A different family member has a problem and gets a super power - over and over again. Each chapter is well written and interesting in itself but in a book that contains such free flowing and magical ideas, the repetition of structure gets dull and seems to jar with the nature of the stories. Perhaps it's a case of having too much of a good thing, but I wish Amsterdam had taken just one idea and run with it.

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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You can read more book reviews or buy What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
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