She Treads Softly: A Game for All the Family

Monday, May 23, 2016

A Game for All the Family

A Game for All the Family by Sophie Hannah

HarperCollins: 5/24/16
eBook review copy; 464 pages
ISBN-13: 9780062388292

A Game for All the Family by Sophie Hannah is a complex family drama where insanity is a close companion.

Justine Merrison has left London for Devon, along with her opera singer husband, Alex, and their 14 year-old daughter, Ellen. Justine, a former TV producer plans to do nothing at Speedwell House, their new estate. Trouble starts when she receives a weird, oddly threatening phone call from some woman who apparently thinks Justine should know her. After a second phone call, it becomes clear that whoever is calling has a lot of information about Justine while she still doesn't have a clue about the identity of the caller.

At the same time her daughter Ellen is writing a murder mystery story for school about the Ingrey family, who, from the story, may have lived at Speedwell House in the past. Justine is concerned about the events in the story and her daughter's frame of mind to be writing about such things. When she talks to Ellen, Ellen is more distraught that her best friend, George Donbavand, has been expelled from school for no good reason. When Justine asks about George at the school, she is told that no such student ever existed.

All the bizarre events meander down a twisted, convoluted trail with several implausible leaps of intuition to eventually interconnect in the end. While Hannah does an excellent job making you wonder about the reliability of Justine as a narrator, she also expects you to follow and accept Justine's implausible connections and impetuous behavior as normal perceptive actions. Many of them aren't. Additionally, there is a whole lot going on that you need to keep straight, including alternate chapters with the story Ellen is writing about the Ingrey family.

I'm in a quandary about this novel. While I basically enjoyed it, it also felt way too long, complicated, and entangled to be credible. No matter how how relaxed the school is, no head mistress of a school would give out any information about a family in the school. Additionally, most people would contact the police as soon as they received the first threatening phone call, and they would have been taken seriously until they had cause to doubt their veracity. In most cases the authorities would be called if a family was behaving like the Donbavands.

There were more problematic leaps of credibility for me. While I did enjoy the novel, I'm not sure the ending was worth it. For that reason it's only recommended.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of HarperCollins for review purposes.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.