This is a story within a story, with Effie trying to piece together several stories at once. She is writing a crime novel for her creative writing class, while at the same time she is on an island with her mother, trying to reconstruct her own family history. She doesn’t know the whole story, so she uses her descriptions to try to prompt her mother into revealing the missing pieces of her past. As Effie puts it: “My mother is not my mother, her mother is not her mother, her father is not her father, her sister is not her sister, her brother is not her brother.” So yes, it is a rather complicated story to follow! But these intertwined stories gradually become touching and intricate pieces of a life, all centred around a daughter trying to understand where she comes from and, ultimately, who she is. I particularly loved the ethereal passages between Effie and her mother, as well as the very witty sections about Effie’s own life at university. A lovely, slightly magical novel that manages to be both clever and deeply touching.
“The McCues’ dog, Duke, pattered into the kitchen. Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls.
Duke sniffed around the floor looking for something to eat other than words; the kitchen floor usually rendered up any number of food deposits. Today there was a raw egg that someone had dropped and not bothered to clean up. Duke licked up the egg with one sweep of his tongue, skilfully avoiding the broken shell, and then sat down heavily as if his legs had given way and drooled at the chicken drumstick that Archie was gnawing on like a caveman.
Adding to the general air of disarray in the McCue household were a number of animals. In descending order of size after Duke these were: a hefty cat called Goneril; a Dutch rabbit (Dorothea); a guinea-pig (Bramwell); and, finally, a hamster called McFluffy who was replaced by a new McFluffy every few months whenever the old McFluffy was either eaten by Goneril, trodden on by Philippa or sat on by Duke (or vice versa). A considerable number of McFluffies had simply packed their pouches and escaped from prison, disappearing into the innards of the house, so that behind the wainscoting and under the floorboards there now lived a tribe of feral hamsters conducting guerrilla warfare against the McCue household.”