Item: Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Rating: 4.5
Author: Catherine

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
Published by Picador
Publication date: December 1, 2020
Genres: Fiction, Childhood, Historical

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Ruby Lennox has no intention of waiting to be noticed. She is the front and center, the axis in the familial wheel that is Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. The novel begins with her announcing her own conception when her father drunkenly impregnates her mother. From this instant on we journey with Ruby through a family saga that sifts and shifts from the late 1800s to the present-day, landing in Canada, Europe, and even Australia, but always circling back to their home town of York, England.

Despite her assertive beginnings Ruby is a quiet child, a keen observer of everything going on around her and beset with questions that float in the back of her mind almost but not close enough to grasp. She’s growing up with a mother who is all bark in her unhappiness, a wayward father, and an older sister who views them all with disdain bordering on disgust. Throughout Behind the Scenes Ruby never feels like she quite belongs nor can she get answers as to why.

The progress of Ruby’s life, from childhood to adulthood, is separated by chapters called Footnotes that fill in the blanks of her family’s history beginning 100 years ago with the exhausted and very pregnant (for the 5^th time) Alice who succumbs to a flirtatious photographer, thereby producing the only ancestral photograph Ruby has. These footnote chapters are a creative way to pull in the history that goes into filling in her life, but they got distracting at times. To be in the midst of a major life event and then be thrown back to another time and place was a bit jarring. Thankfully, the effect faded as the timelines came closer to converging.

Behind the Scenes is a novel of women. Weary and worn-out women lining the genealogical path from Ruby’s mother Bunty all the way back to her great-grandmother. They illuminate lives of disappointment, disapproval and sorrow, veering at times into grim, but written with such acerbic verve that laughter softens the edges. I was teary when the story ended, not out of sadness, but for the character that was Ruby. Even as she trudged down some of the same roads as her ancestors she burned bright.