How could a family and a marriage fall apart after so many happy
years? Rachel Jensen finds out in Dani Shapiro's novel FAMILY
HISTORY, the story of her family and how they deal with a child
that shows signs of mental illness. The book opens with Rachel
sitting in her house alone, watching home movies taken by her
husband Ned. She stares at the movie screen and sees herself and
her family, yet she does not recognize them. The happy smiles and
laughter that she is watching is from a lifetime ago. She still has
not adjusted to her new life without her husband or her daughter
Kate. The smiles and laughter are only memories. The only remnant
of her family is her young son Joshua, who lives with her in this
house. He is far too young to really understand how bad things are
for his parents and he does not know that he has a sister named
Kate. For most of Joshua's life, Kate has not lived with the
family.

Rachel goes downstairs to check her phone messages and listens to
one that asks her to go to Stone Mountain in regards to Kate.
Whatever the news is, Rachel is dreading to hear it. There could be
no good news if they are calling her about Kate.

How did things get to this point? The bulk of the story is told in
flashbacks. As the story line slowly progresses and the appointment
at Stone Mountain approaches, the reader learns about Ned and
Rachel's courtship and their romantic dreams of being artists
before their children were even a glimmer in their eyes. The two of
them lived in New York and, while trying to make their artistic
dreams come true, Rachel learns she is pregnant. With the help of
Ned's parents, who also happen to be very wealthy, they buy a
fixer-upper near his parents' home in Massachusetts. It's away from
the big city and closer to her in-laws, who could help them out as
the two of them try to make a new life for their new family. Rachel
sees this move as a big change --- along with her pregnancy --- and
it becomes one of the pivotal points in their lives.

We learn about Kate, who had shown much promise of a bright future.
We learn about the event that ultimately sends Kate away from her
family, because she is too unstable to be cared for at home by her
parents. Neither Ned nor Rachel saw the signs that led to this
event. They did not see the signs that would have told them that
Kate would start to go through a transformation, from
happy-go-lucky preteen to sullen and moody teenager. Close friends
said it was just a phase all girls go through and Rachel believed
it for a while. Then things started to get worse.

They did not predict the unexplainable tantrums and mood swings
Kate would begin to experience: her foul language at home,
shoplifting incidences and hanging out with the wrong crowd. Again,
this all could have been a phase that Kate was going through. No
one would have believed that things would get so bad that Kate
would have the power to break apart and destroy their family and
nearly ruin a marriage and a love that should have lasted
throughout the years. Ned and Rachel are united in their love and
care for Kate, but when Kate reveals the ultimate accusation at her
father, their lives are torn apart.

FAMILY HISTORY sounds like a complex psychological drama built
around a family that is falling apart. Part of the story is just
that, but there are other layers to this book. The relationship
with mother and daughters is a secondary plot as we compare
Rachel's relationship with her own dysfunctional mother to that of
her own relationship with Kate. The study of a marriage is another
subplot --- how two people who thought they knew each other so well
become total strangers overnight. All these factors helped make
this a very fast read for me, but overall I enjoyed the way Dani
Shapiro writes. She made these characters seem familiar to me; I
felt close to all of them, as if I was the friend or family that
surrounded them. I finished this book in a record 24 hours. That's
how much I enjoyed this book. This reviewer highly recommends
FAMILY HISTORY and looks forward to reading Dani Shapiro's other
novels.