SOURCE: "New Voices Spin Tales of Fiction, Mostly Fiction," in The Christian Science Monitor, January 10, 1996, p. 14.

[In the following excerpt, Rubin offers a mixed review of Behind the Scenes at the Museum.]

From England, more specifically the cathedral city of York, comes an ambitious, exuberant first novel that takes the form of a young woman narrating her autobiography, starting with the moment of her conception and dipping into past generations of her family while moving forward through her own girlhood.

The narrator of Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum is Ruby Lennox, youngest daughter of a family that lives "above the shop," in this case, a pet shop. Dad is a hard-drinking skirt chaser, Mom a mean-spirited bundle of resentments, big sister Patricia a model of moral and scholastic rectitude, and middle sister Gillian a bratty egotist. As for Ruby—she is, in her own words...