Library Journal
★ 09/01/2013 :
Anna is the daughter of anthropologist and writer Jessica Speight and is her "pure gold baby"—a happy and loving child with special needs and capabilities. As a single mother in 1960s London, Jess navigates career, relationships, and the National Health Service with compromise, determination, and the help of a close-knit circle of friends, including the narrator, an attorney and mother. Readers follow Anna and Jess for four decades amid frequent musings on parenthood, aging, mental health care, and London's changing neighborhoods. Through it all are woven accounts of Jess's lifelong anthropological research interests, studied mostly at a distance. This is an intimate look at a small family and its circle, told with wit, sensitivity, and deft knowledge of the household details of its setting. Drabble, the distinguished author of more than two dozen novels (e.g., The Radiant Way; The Seven Sisters) and works of nonfiction (The Oxford Companion to English Literature), is a masterly storyteller and a preeminent chronicler of modern life. VERDICT Readers who yearn for well-crafted fiction full of thoughtful ideas and observations should welcome this heartily.