Family Pictures

A Novel

De: Sue Miller

Narrado por: Vivienne Leheny

“Profoundly honest, shapely, ambitious, engrossing.”—New York Times Book Review

From bestselling author Sue Miller comes a masterful novel about the life of a large family that is deeply bonded by the stranger in their midst—an autistic child.

The whole world could not have broken the spirit and strength of the Eberhardt family of 1948. Lainey is a wonderful if slightly eccentric mother. David is a good father, sometimes sarcastic, always cool-tempered. Two wonderful children round out the perfect picture. Then the third child arrives—and life is never the same again. Over the next forty years, the Eberhardt family struggles to live with a flood tide of upheaval and heartbreak, love and betrayal, passion and pain...hoping they can someday heal their hearts.

Family Pictures is an unforgettable, insightful, and resounding novel of strength and resiliency against overwhelming circumstances.

Beautiful descriptive writing

Loved the long languid descriptions of the books characters and life situations. I empathized with Lainey and David and each of the children as they aged and found their individual ways through life. I feel that I learned something about what it’s like to have a severely disabled person in a family and the impact that it has on each and every family member. It is not easy and the author wrote about the psychological effects it had on each of them.

Why?

At first, I was captured by the writing. It's clear and sometimes lovely. Then I became interested in the representation of the period. I was young in the 50s and 60s. The author is a keen observer. I became interested in the family members. We see each as an individual with a more or less fully developed perspective. Then I was caught up by the way the mother was blamed for her son's disability, for which there was no diagnosis in the 1950s. Blamed by the system, and by her husband who embodied that system so successfully, she tried to fight back. She was brilliant but straightjacketed. It was her story I found most compelling.

But finally, I was exhausted. The novel drags on for decades and takes so many side trips. I wanted to scream "Daddy, are we there yet?" Yes, the observations were still keen. The characters evolved. But I was bored and didn't like them very much. I still have no idea what the point of the book was. I skipped through the last couple of hours and listened to the final bits, hoping for some dramatic denouement, some reason for this endless saga. If there was one, I missed it. My initial pleasure and engagement were lost and I ended up resenting the time it took to get through it all.