Carys Bray - The Museum Of You

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Readable, engaging and thoughful

I thought this was an excellent book.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but it turned out to be very well written, engaging and with some important things to say.

The Museum Of You is a novel of character, told in the third person from the point of view of two characters: Clover Quinn, a twelve-year-old girl who lives with her father Darren in a small town outside Liverpool, and Darren himself, an ordinary, flawed but thoroughly decent man who is a bus driver and tries his very best to bring Clover up well.  Clover's mother, Becky, died soon after she was born, and we get very penetrating insights into their characters as Clover spends a summer holiday at home sorting through the unsorted mementos and detritus of her mother's life and creating the museum of the title to try to understand who she was.

That's it, really.  There isn’t a lot of action, but there is a very involving story as the truth about her mother's death slowly emerges.  It's beautifully done, with excellently painted, utterly believable characters with their flaws and foibles, and a very shrewd understanding of how people deal with (or fail to deal with) loss and grief.  It is gentle and compassionate but also very acute in its observations, and deals mainly with kindness in its different, sometimes misplaced forms.  I also found it full of quiet but rather brilliant insights, like Darren recalling the happy year after he and Becky first moved into their house: "He wishes he could remember more of the year that followed.  But contentment lacks specifics, it's easily swallowed and effortlessly stomached."

The writing is unfussy and very readable, and it creates an excellent atmosphere both of Clover's growing up and of Darren's struggle and anxiety to do the right thing  by her.  Her ear for dialogue is spot-on and other characters are well drawn and often amusing - like Mrs Mackerel, the neighbour with her constant malapropisms - and I found the book piercingly touching in places, too. 

In short, this is a very good book which is a pleasure to read, which I found very involving and which will stay with me for a long time.  Warmly recommended.