TRH Book Advent Day 3: Behind the Scenes at the Museum #GuestPost

My name is Sarah and I blog over at MumofThree World, where I’m usually found writing about family life with my two big boys and my little girl. I love reading and love sharing my thoughts on books.

I’m a big fan of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie crime novels. They are just so British. Behind the Scenes at the Museum came before them, it was Kate Atkinson’s very first novel. It is different from the Brodie books. You wouldn’t know they were written by the same author, except that they are both brilliantly written, humorous and quite dark.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum is narrated by Ruby, the youngest of three sisters, growing up in the 1950s in a family which doesn’t seem to care. The story charts her life right through to the 1990s. Ruby talks about her family and the many mishaps they endure. Sadly, rather a lot of them die along the way.

Every other chapter goes back in time to Ruby’s grandmother’s childhood (the grandmother appears as an old lady too). Over the years, the family is touched by plenty of tragedy and a load of extremely bad parenting by generations of women.

About three quarters of the way through the book, there is a big twist which totally shocked me and had me in buckets of tears. This made sense of a lot Ruby’s peculiar behaviour and the reasons for her mother treating her so badly.

This is a brilliant book, easy to read and entertaining and I would recommend it to anyone (although I did keep a page folded for reference to help me remember all of the family members!). A great Christmas present for anyone who enjoys reading. It’s a long book, but fast-moving and not too challenging.

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I asked other bloggers for reviews for books of all ages as part of our Christmas TRH Book Advent. Maybe slip a book into the advent for yourself – I’m sure some of the other books the children will want to read again and again anyway, or some of them may be too big for one sitting. I feel it’s important that we model the behaviour we want our children to do – so they really need to see you sitting down reading too (whether that’s with a book or a kindle etc).

As adults are very important people I thought that I would couple this with another important person – I like to call him Father Christmas but you can also call him Santa. We painted the toilet roll holder (TRH) black to represent his trousers and boots. We then cut a circle from white paper and drew on a smiley face and glued it on. Then simply we made a cone shape  out of red paper and a red cloak too and attached them. Then glued on cotton wool for his beard and white bits around his hat.