A Perfectly Good Family
Written by Lionel Shriver
Narrated by Susan Ericksen
3/5
()
About this audiobook
Following the death of her worthy liberal parents, Corlis McCrea moves back into her family's grand Reconstruction mansion in North Carolina, willed to all three siblings. Her timid younger brother has never left home. When her bullying black-sheep older brother moves into "his" house as well, it's war.
Each heir wants the house. Yet to buy the other out, two siblings must team against one. Just as in girlhood, Corlis is torn between allying with the decent but fearful youngest and the iconoclastic eldest, who covets his legacy to destroy it. A Perfectly Good Family is a stunning examination of inheritance, literal and psychological: what we take from our parents, what we discard, and what we are stuck with, like it or not.
Lionel Shriver
Lionel Shriver nació en 1957, en Carolina del Norte. Periodista y escritora, estudió en la Universidad de Columbia, ha vivido en Nairobi, Belfast y Bangkok, y en la actualidad reside en Londres. Después de varias novelas, en el año 2005 ganó el prestigioso Premio Orange con Tenemos que hablar de Kevin, que se convirtió en un bestseller internacional y consagró a la autora: «Un libro muy valiente, muy arriesgado, muy trabajado y muy impactante, sin concesiones ni gratuidades, de poderoso calado literario» (José María Guelbenzu, El País). Además de esta, Anagrama también ha publicado sus siguientes novelas: El mundo después del cumpleaños: «Una escritora que va siempre a por todas» (Pablo Martínez Zarracina); «Repleta de humor inteligente» (Ramón Loureiro, La Voz de Galicia); Todo esto para qué: «Mordaz y de un humor negrísimo, después de leer a Shriver ya todas las demás nos parecen tontas e insulsas» (Gabriela Wiener, Marie Claire); «Me leí su novela anterior, El día después del cumpleaños, y no quiero dejar de leerme todo lo que hace» (Lola Beccaria, El País); «Lionel Shriver no escribe, construye bombas» (Laura Fernández, El Mundo); Big Brother: «La lucidez de Lionel Shriver nos da siempre un merecido y a ratos hilarante bofetón. Nos mantiene despiertos» (Marta Sanz, El Confidencial); y Los Mandible: «Shriver perfecciona su condición de cronista social... La autoconsciente brillantez de sus diálogos y el satírico aliento de su prosa se con-juran, como en las mejores novelas de Jonathan Franzen o Jeffrey Eugenides, a favor de sus personajes, que siempre resultan cercanos» (Sergi Sánchez, El Periódico).
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Reviews for A Perfectly Good Family
64 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In 1992, thirtysomething expat Corlis McCrea returns from London to her family home in Raleigh, North Carolina. The parents McCrea have both passed away, and Corlis and her two brothers have to figure out what to do with their inheritance: a Reconstruction-era mansion where they grew up and where the youngest still lives with his wife. The idea of all three siblings living there together--while possible, as the place has 24 rooms--is never on the table. And since none of them can afford to buy out the others alone, the result is a shifting tide of secret alliances and betrayals.The title reflects Corlis' observation about Eugenia McCrea, their mother, and her aversion to waste: "There was always one half-inch chunk of a Macintosh that was 'perfectly good', leaving me to question my mother's compromised version of perfection.... This curious inclination to sacrifice the whole for the part--to leave mould on one side of the cheddar, to gouge out only half the tomato rot, or bake an otherwise gorgeous gingerbread with fermented molasses--must have had larger implications for her life. Had she been a Civil War surgeon, she couldn't have brought herself to chop off any of the 'perfectly good' leg and what's wrong with leaving just a little infection and all her patients would have died from gangrene."As usual, Shriver neither lionizes or demonizes her characters. They're by turns destructive, selfish, petty, myopic, and flatly unlikeable. They are also fully realized, each with a unique voice and motive. I'd give this a full five stars, except that it's not quite to the standard to which I've come to hold Shriver, after We Need to Talk About Kevin. In this novel, she occasionally provides analyses of her characters in a way that made me think: don't *tell* me, *show* me. Still, highly recommended.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A tragicomedy with sharp unsparing insights into the complexities of human character and family relationships. Excellent narration (audiobook) that captures almost perfectly the cross-Atlantic accents of the characters.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I never have managed to get the book about taking to kevin so I though I would try another of her books.It was pleasant enough, the people in the book were real while you were reading them. The plot was failrly predictable and the writing easy to follow. seems a little lacking in something that I just cant put my finger on to lift it into the excellent catagory, which it is so close to
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Wow. This book didn't thrill me. Lionel Shriver is still one of my favorite authors, but this book.... It took me several days to read. The three main characters were just boring, and frankly stupid.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I bought this book after loving The Post-Birthday World, and being deeply affected by We Need to Talk about Kevin. Unfortunately, I found this book not nearly as good.A Perfectly Good Family is abou three siblings in a battle over the house left to them by their parents....a battle that is really about much deeper family issues. I found it difficult to really care about the characters, who seemed to come to life only in opposition to each other. And, the writing seemed to make the same point over and and over -- whether about the mother's obsessions or the father's distance, or.....