A Dysfunctional Family In The Process Of Kealing.

Carys Bray writes literary fiction about the kind of people that literary fiction often ignores. Her first novel featured a Mormon family falling apart at the seams; The Museum Of You is about twelve year old Clover who lives with her under-achieving father, a man who has been in emotional limbo since his wife, Becky, was killed in a road accident a few weeks after Clover’s birth.

Clover spends a lot of time with the elderly woman next door or down on her father’s allotment. Then a school visit to a museum and a chance encounter with a curator gives her the idea of creating a museum to her dead mother out of artefacts rescued from the vast pile of junk from her parents’ married life that her father has not got round to sorting out.

The trouble is, in the absence of any meaningful conversation with her father about what Becky was really like, Clover gets it all wrong and when she finally presents the resultant installation her father, it is a long way from being the nice surprise she had envisaged.

Perhaps that makes this book sound like a sombre read. Actually it’s more wistful than anything else, sometimes very funny, and ultimately uplifting. But what really makes the book work and what gives it the ring of truth is the relationship between Clover and her father. Carys Bray understands parenthood intimately, its joys and sorrows, its rewards and compromises. That knowledge finds its way into every page of this book and the result is a compelling portrait of a dysfunctional family in the process of healing.