The Family Tree (Hardcover)

by Carole Cadwalladr (Author)
Key Phrases: lady prime minister, hedge sparrow, Granny Monroe, Uncle Kenneth, Beech Drive (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The ease with which British journalist Cadwalladr spins three generational tales in her debut is outdone only by the grace and wit with which she delivers each one. Set in late–20th-century Britain, the novel is narrated by Rebecca Monroe, a pop culture researcher who tells of her marriage to Alistair, a behavioral geneticist; her childhood leading up to her mother's suicide; and her grandmother's doomed biracial romance with Cecil, a Jamaican immigrant. In an effort to better understand herself, the child she can't decide whether or not to have, and the people she still can't believe make up her family, Rebecca considers both sides of the nature/nurture debate, with any romantic notions she might be on the brink of reaching debunked by her husband's passionless scientific postulations. Cadwalladr explicates her tale with a slew of definitions, scientific charts and graphs, detailed family anatomies, examples of deductive fallacies and footnotes expounding on such essential '70s pop culture references as Dallas and The Sale of the Century. Her mastery of time and place, wry humor and sporadic bouts of self-doubt will endear her to readers, while her fascination with the choices people make combined with a morbid curiosity about her own fate add depth and texture to this utterly winning tale of one lovable, dysfunctional family.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–While working on her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, Rebecca Monroe, the wry narrator and central character in this engrossing debut novel, grapples with the nature versus nurture debate. Her husband is a behavioral geneticist who is certain he knows the answer–it's in the genes. But as Rebecca explores her grandparents' relationship, her findings take off in surprising directions. She interweaves the stories of three generations of her relatives from the 1940s, the 1970s, and the present to show a bleakly funny, unsentimental view of an English family unraveling and then coming together. Rebecca gives insight into her childhood by sprinkling her story with cultural references such as the TV series Dallas and Charlie's Angels, explaining them with hilarious footnotes. She uses charts and graphs to show aspects of genetics and kinship, giving a sense of order and tidiness to the unreliable and sometimes messy world of human relations. The novel is well paced and the story is compelling, with vivid characters, especially the women. The author makes sense of the tangled ties among the generations and navigates them with humor and compassion, as she does the themes of racism, mental illness, marriage, and, of course, nature versus nurture.–Susanne Bardelson, Kitsap Regional Library, WA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Dutton Adult; First Edition edition (December 29, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525948422
• ISBN-13: 978-0525948421
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #853,291 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At Last., March 10, 2005

By	K. L. Cotugno (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ever since reading Behind the Scenes at the Museum, I have been hoping to find a writer to match Kate Atkinson. Some have come very close (Barbara Trapido, Hillary Mankell, Tom Perrotta). Now comes Carole Cadwalladr. She performs that most delicate of juggling acts -- keeping at least three stories spinning along, with each generation, each decade being presented in all its silliness. As one reviewer pointed out, it helps to have lived in all the times depicted, which is one of the reasons why I can relate to the story so strongly. I look forward to Cadwalladr's next book as eagerly as I anticipate future offerings from Atkinson, Trapido, and Mankell.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book, January 10, 2005

By	Maisie Miller (Detroit) - See all my reviews

The Family Tree is that rare book: a novel that moves you, makes you laugh, forces you to read on (I stayed up until 3am as I just couldn't put it down), and stays with you long after you've finished the final page.
It's so unusual to come across a book that is not only so humorous (the depiction of the wilder shores of 1970s suburbia is hilarious), but also so intelligent. The Family Tree raises all sorts of questions about family, class, sex, relationships, race, genes, popular culture...yet it never feels forced or artificial. By plotting three generations of the same family, these questions occur naturally: how much of who we are is determined by our genes? By our upbringing? By the TV we watched? By our memories?
At the heart of the book is the question of nature versus nurture. Rebecca Monroe, the central character, has two strikes against her: naturewise, she's possibly inherited her mother's unstable genes; nurturewise, she is haunted by the guilty knowledge that she was in some way responsible for the breakdown of her family.
As a graduate student studying popular culture, she relates incidents from her 70s childhood (the child's eye view of her parent's marriage is only ever half right), weighing up too, the impact of Dallas, Love Story and Charlie's Angels. She tries to understand not only her personal history but also how the age in which she grew up has influenced and affected her (furtively reading her feminist aunt's copy of The Joy of Sex and trying to imitate Lady Diana's hairstyle, for example). Her husband, on the other hand, a geneticist, believes that personality is simply a by-product of our DNA.
It's a great and satisfying read that defies categorisation. Cadwallader's understanding of the workings of family is reminiscent of Anne Tyler or Carol Shields. While the high comedy of the 1970's scenes has shades of David Sedaris. But, it's the ending that lifts the Family Tree into a class of its own - a moving, poignant, finale that left me gasping for more.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A challenging chronicle of one family's unhappy history , February 13, 2005

By	N. Larrabee (Tarrytown, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The unique manner in which this book is format is distinctive yet sometimes confusing. Rebecca is writing her thesis for her postdoctoral degree on the influences of television on families in the 1970s. Amidst the flashbacks to her childhood, when Rebecca inserts her husband Alistair's scientific opinions about one's DNA it drags down the well-told story. Every time Alistair appears you question why did she marry him? Rebecca's childhood habit of reading the dictionary comes into play at the start of every chapter. The whimsical inserts of words and their definitions are distracting at times. Family tree is the story of three generations of women and the men they married and the ones they loved. The national fervor for the 1981 wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana pushes the Arnold household into a crazed frenzy and to the brink. It is heartwarming to see the love between generations, and it is easy to be empathetic to those with broken relationships. An inimitable story told in a way that you have to catch your breath when you have finished.