SOURCE: A review of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 242, No. 44, October 30, 1995, p. 46.

[In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of Behind the Scenes at the Museum.]

The narrator's insistent voice and breezy delivery animates this enchanting first novel [Behind the Scenes at the Museum] by a British writer who won one of the 1993 Ian St. James Awards for short stories. Ruby Lennox is a quirky, complex character who relates the events of her life and those of her dysfunctional family with equal parts humor, fervor and candor—starting with her moment of conception in York, England, in 1959: "I exist!" Ruby then describes the family she is to join. Her parents own a pet shop; her mother, Bunty, bitterly rues having married her philandering husband, George, and daydreams about what her life might have been. Ruby has two older sisters, willful...