The Nearly Happy Family (Catherine McKinnon, Viking, $32.95 pb, ISBN 9780670072088, June) ***1/2

Told in alternating chapters by mother Jackie and eldest daughter Claire, The Nearly Happy Family is a confident, though perhaps overly long, debut from Catherine McKinnon. Jackie is a struggling comedian who feels the funny has been taken out of life since the possibly accidental drowning death of partner Vince, father of her three children. She is muddling through with varying success, living with her dad T J and drawing on the support of her two sisters Sophie and Liz. There is also a new partner on the scene, Ben. Ben is the source of much conflict between Jackie and her 15-year-old, Claire. Like many a tempestuous and grieving teenager, Claire is determined to resist Ben’s attempts to meld with the family. And so the story goes, the wild, angry voice of the teen running parallel to the more measured, but often equally blinkered voice of her mother, as they blunder their way through death, attempted suicide, new love, betrayal, sex, pregnancy and all the myriad small triumphs that make up the average dysfunctionally functional family’s life. Set in Adelaide and coming in at a hefty 460 pages, this will appeal to readers of Cathy Kelly et al who can handle a little more tragedy and a lot less romance.

Eliza Metcalfe was a bookseller for 10 years and is a former assistant editor of Bookseller+Publisher

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2008, Thorpe-Bowker

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