SOURCE: "From the Mouth of a Babe, Details of Ordinary Lives," in Los Angeles Times, December 27, 1995, p. 5.

[In the positive review below, Jones-Davis describes Behind the Scenes at the Museum as "a powerhouse of storytelling."]

Ruby Lennox, the heroine of Kate Atkinson's stunning first novel, out-Copperfields David Copperfield. While Dickens' David began narrating at his birth, Atkinson's narrator begins working at the moment of her conception.

And hers is indeed a quest to see if she will be the hero of her own story. For the first 40 pages of Behind the Scenes at the Museum, we are being guided by an embryo with an all-seeing, wise-guy take on the world. She's living in York, England, a place so rife with history "there's no room for the living."

She knows the future, she knows the past. Her mostly tragic narrative about a completely ordinary, working-class family will hop, skip...