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    A Perfectly Good Family
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    A Perfectly Good Family
    Unavailable
    A Perfectly Good Family
    Audiobook11 hours

    A Perfectly Good Family

    Written by Lionel Shriver

    Narrated by Jennifer Woodward

    3/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    Following the success of We Need to Talk About Kevin this is a stunning examination of inheritance, literal and psychological: what we take from our parents, what we discard, and what we are stuck with, like it or not.

    After having escaped for years to London, Corlis McCrea returns to the grand Reconstruction mansion where she grew up in North Carolina, now willed to the three grown children following the death of their parents. All three want the house.

    Fiscal necessity dictates that two must buy a third out. Just as she was torn as a girl, the sister must choose between her decent younger brother and the renegade eldest—the black sheep who covets his legacy in order to destroy it. The adult siblings re-enact the deep enmities and loyalties of childhood, as each bids for a bigger slice of the pie.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 4, 2017
    ISBN9780008223236
    Unavailable
    A Perfectly Good Family
    Author

    Lionel Shriver

    Although Lionel Shriver has published many novels, a collection of essays, and a column in the Spectator since 2017, and her journalism has been featured in publications including the Guardian, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, she in no way wishes for the inclusion of this information to imply that she is more “intelligent” or “accomplished” than anyone else. The outdated meritocracy of intellectual achievement has made her a bestselling author multiple times and accorded her awards, including the Orange Prize, but she accepts that all of these accidental accolades are basically meaningless. She lives in Portugal and Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for A Perfectly Good Family

    3/5

    56 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      In 1992, thirtysomething expat Corlis McCrea returns from London to her family home in Raleigh, North Carolina. The parents McCrea have both passed away, and Corlis and her two brothers have to figure out what to do with their inheritance: a Reconstruction-era mansion where they grew up and where the youngest still lives with his wife. The idea of all three siblings living there together--while possible, as the place has 24 rooms--is never on the table. And since none of them can afford to buy out the others alone, the result is a shifting tide of secret alliances and betrayals.The title reflects Corlis' observation about Eugenia McCrea, their mother, and her aversion to waste: "There was always one half-inch chunk of a Macintosh that was 'perfectly good', leaving me to question my mother's compromised version of perfection.... This curious inclination to sacrifice the whole for the part--to leave mould on one side of the cheddar, to gouge out only half the tomato rot, or bake an otherwise gorgeous gingerbread with fermented molasses--must have had larger implications for her life. Had she been a Civil War surgeon, she couldn't have brought herself to chop off any of the 'perfectly good' leg and what's wrong with leaving just a little infection and all her patients would have died from gangrene."As usual, Shriver neither lionizes or demonizes her characters. They're by turns destructive, selfish, petty, myopic, and flatly unlikeable. They are also fully realized, each with a unique voice and motive. I'd give this a full five stars, except that it's not quite to the standard to which I've come to hold Shriver, after We Need to Talk About Kevin. In this novel, she occasionally provides analyses of her characters in a way that made me think: don't *tell* me, *show* me. Still, highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      I never have managed to get the book about taking to kevin so I though I would try another of her books.It was pleasant enough, the people in the book were real while you were reading them. The plot was failrly predictable and the writing easy to follow. seems a little lacking in something that I just cant put my finger on to lift it into the excellent catagory, which it is so close to
    • 3/5
      Wow. This book didn't thrill me. Lionel Shriver is still one of my favorite authors, but this book.... It took me several days to read. The three main characters were just boring, and frankly stupid.
    • 2/5
      I bought this book after loving The Post-Birthday World, and being deeply affected by We Need to Talk about Kevin. Unfortunately, I found this book not nearly as good.A Perfectly Good Family is abou three siblings in a battle over the house left to them by their parents....a battle that is really about much deeper family issues. I found it difficult to really care about the characters, who seemed to come to life only in opposition to each other. And, the writing seemed to make the same point over and and over -- whether about the mother's obsessions or the father's distance, or.....