Rating: 
Summary: This one will remain with you long after reading.
Review: A powerful story about the seemingly happy Jensen family - Rachel, an art restorer, Ned, an artist who put his dreams on hold to become a teacher to support his family, and Katie, their much-loved daughter. All is well until Rachel becomes pregnant at the age of 39 and Katie's jealousy erupts out-of-control. She becomes sullen and withdrawn and over the course of the book, two of her unthinking acts of attention getting will shatter their family.Rachel's pure love for her children, no matter what, will touch a chord with any mother and her longing for her dissolving marriage will break your heart. Her 'I don't care' attitude with the other mothers who shun her because of her family's problems is easily seen through and will make you want to reach out and be her friend. I read this book in one day - a huge accomplishment with two little ones of my own to care for - but I cared so much about the characters and what happened to them that I grabbed every moment I could to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Not enough family history
Review: Although this book kept my attention, I was waiting for more of a BAM of a climax. I found the characters predictable and unoriginal: the daughter of a high-falutin' mother marries someone who doesn't meet up with her mother's expectations and finds disappointment in both of them; the artist husband trapped in an uncreative, unfulfilling job; the country club neighbors Rachel, the main character, just doesn't fit in with (although she was raised the same way as they were); and the self-made wealthy in-laws whom the Jensen family resents but still accepts money from to pay for their kids' educations and treatment. Have these people heard of public schools? Have they ever considered maybe moving away if they really want to be independent of the elder Jensens and Rachel's mom?
I think Shapiro wants us to feel for Rachel and her situation, but it's hard for me to believe that she and her family are just scraping by when they live in a tony suburb, both she and her husband come from upper-class families and they have basically had it good till their daughter turns Sybil.
I really didn't garner much sympathy for Rachel even though, again, Shapiro wants us to. Poor Rachel having to grow up in a beautiful apartment directly across from Central Park and never being allowed to walk to the park! Poor Rachel and hubby having to move into a huge, Victorian house in and upper-class suburb because living in the city is just too darn expensive! Sorry, I just didn't feel the compassion.
I think the book would have been more effective if Shapiro dwelled more on the daughter's transformation and the family history/genetics that may have attributed to the girl's change in behavior. Just briefly is it mentioned that a couple male relatives--Rachel's father and grandfather--had depression and that Rachel's mother has a borderline personality disorder, although Rachel makes her mother out to be evil. Why should we feel compassion for Rachel's situation and Kate's illness when Rachel herself doesn't have much compassion or understanding for her own mother's? I guess the family is a fairly decent portrayal of today's self-involved generation, although I don't think Shapiro meant for them to be painted in that light.
Rating:
Summary: Wrenching domestic drama.
Review: Dani Shapiro's novel, "Family History" is a painful look at the disintegration of a once close-knit family. Ned and Rachel Jensen are a happily married couple who live in a suburb not far from Boston. Ned, who had once hoped to be a working artist, is a popular high school teacher and Rachel is a devoted mother and part-time art restorer. Their daughter, Kate, is bright, athletic, and beautiful.
Everything changes when Kate turns thirteen and comes home from camp with a sullen, distant, and rebellious attitude. She begins to show signs of emotional disturbance, and as time goes on, her condition deteriorates. After Rachel learns that she is pregnant, she desperately hopes that their lives will once again be happy and serene. Her hopes are dashed when tragedy strikes and threatens to rip the Jensens apart forever.
Dani Shapiro has an intimate writing style that draws the reader into these troubled lives. We feel Rachel's panic as she sees all that she values slipping away from her. Ned is a caring husband and father who has given up his dream to be an artist in order to support the wife and child he adores. He is shocked when he realizes that his sacrifices may all have been in vain. Kate is a lost soul whose sensitivity and hurt overwhelm her and warp her judgment. There are some nicely depicted supporting players in this novel, as well, most notably Rachel's mother, a self-absorbed harridan named Phyllis who is hypercritical and cold towards Rachel.
What keeps "Family History" from being just another overwrought soap opera? Shapiro fleshes out her characters thoroughly and she injects elements of hope and compassion into her story that keep the book from sinking under the weight of unrelieved gloom. She poignantly shows that when two people truly love one another, they never stop trying to fix what seems to have been irrevocably broken. "Family History" teeters on the edge of melodrama, but it is saved by Shapiro's moving and compassionate depiction of a family ravaged by life.
Rating:
Summary: Gripping!
Review: Family History
Dana Shapiro
5 stars
This was a remarkable story about a loving family until tragedy, guilt and a lie send them spiraling down. Shapiro has weaved a gripping story full of human emotions. I read this in one day.
Dawnny
Rating:
Summary: A family falling apart
Review: FAMILY HISTORY by Dani Shapiro FAMILY HISTORY is a story of a woman's struggle to keep her family together and herself sane after a series of events threatens to hurt her marriage and tear it apart. Rachel Jensen at one point in her life was able to say that she had the perfect life. She was not financially rich by any means, but she could vouch that her family was a happy one, and her marriage was solid and full of love and laughter. There wasn't anything she felt she lacked monetarily, and this was important to her, since throughout their marriage they had to prove to their parents that they could indeed make it financially on the type of dreams they were shooting for. She knew she was the envy of others, and would never have thought that this world that she was familiar with was about to come crashing down around her. The book opens to a scene with Rachel sitting alone in her bedroom, wallowing in self-pity as she watches old home movies of her husband and her daughter Kate laughing and smiling. It is a movie of happier times, before the baby was born, and before their daughter Kate started to change right before their eyes. The reader knows immediately that there is something terribly wrong, as she is sitting in her bedroom alone in the dark. Her husband no longer lives with her, and their daughter has not lived with them in quite a while. All that is left in her life is baby Josh, and he is far too young to comprehend that anything is wrong with their family.
The destructive events that occur that destroy the harmony of the family are centered on Kate, who by this time is a young teenager going through a lot of extreme emotional and behavioral changes. Rachel is told that this is just a phase all teenagers go through, and Rachel believes it for a while, but when Kate's behavior becomes so hard to manage, Rachel is not sure what to think anymore. The book is told in parallel - we see flashbacks of her courtship with her husband Ned and their early years together in New York. At the same time we are back in the present day, where Ned and Rachel are worrying about the future of their daughter Kate, who is in an institution for troubled young adults. I felt this method of story-telling helped keep the action moving, and kept my interest in the characters alive as I got to know them starting from their younger years together and through their current messed up lives. The climax of events leads to a horrible accident that could have been prevented, and that event in turn leads to yet another horrible incident that causes the break up of the family. It is a living nightmare that they are going through, and no one knows if there is any relief in sight. FAMILY HISTORY by Dani Shapiro is a book that was so intense that it was probably the fastest read I've had in a long time. It's one of those books that you can't put down. I want to compare this book to Elizabeth Berg's best novels, which often center on strong women or women who are trying to find themselves and make new lives for themselves. In FAMILY HISTORY, we have a woman that thought her love was strong enough to deal with any obstacle, but finds her love is tested because of a child that is ill. I'm giving this an enthusiastic thumbs up, and am willing to read any other book that has been penned by Dani Shapiro.
Rating:
Summary: Family History: A Stunner
Review: Family History is a moving, literate and compelling book about a family- one which could be yours or mine because we are all captive to the vagaries of life. Not one of us is promised joy, happiness, lack of travail or good luck. This is a story about a family which from the outside should be the envy of the community. They have beauty, intelligence and each other and yet that may not be enough to save them. Shapiro takes us inside the soul of the Jensen family and keeps us guessing about what has gone so terribly wrong to such good people. Why is their world spiraling out of control?
Shapiro is a gifted and insightful writer. She makes us care about people who are not always likeable. If you don't recognize yourself within this family -- you haven't been paying attention to your life.
Rating:
Summary: A Page Turner
Review: Family History kept me turning pages to find out what turn of events brought them to where they are when the novel opens. I enjoyed being thrown into the middle of the story at the beginning of the book. Ned and Rachel are already apart. Katie is 'away' and Rachel is questioning Joshie's possible developmental delays. An excellent read and one that is prompting me to obtain other books by this author.
Rating:
Summary: Sad, but not hopeless
Review: I don't usually like very sad books, and this is a terribly, terribly sad book. Rachel nearly drowns with the consciousness of her inability to fix her family, with the knowledge that everything went wrong; she is tormented by the thought of her own, emotionally vampiric mother, afraid she may have given Kate bad genes. I think what made this work for me- while other books or stories that are in some ways less pressingly sad throughout completely turn me off- is that this is not a book which denies the power of human beings to reach and comfort one another. Even Kate is not entirely unreachable, and Rachel and Ned are able to at least try. There is progress; there is understanding. At the beginning of the book, Rachel has lost hope and is barely keeping herself alive, and we are invited into her worst moments, but we are also invited into the moments at which hope begins to return. There are no easy solutions- for Kate, for Josh, for the marriage- but neither is there a sense of hopeless, of complete isolation.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully written, true to life
Review: I loved this book. It is a simple, yet poignant story of a family in crisis. It is realistic, sad, but also hopeful. Dani Shapiro is such a gifted writer, and I read this in two days. I could not put Family History down, and read until 3:00a.m I only wish it was longer, and that perhaps she will write a sequel to Family History. Well worth reading!
Rating:
Summary: Shapiro's full talents emerge in subtle, compelling account
Review: In earlier works, Dani Shapiro revealed glimpses of brilliance in her exploration of the complex tensions that either sunder or fortify family relationships. "Family History, a novel that compassionately exposes a family unraveling under the most extreme circumstances, is a masterwork. Subtle, unsettling and compelling, Shapiro's treatment of family crisis, adolescent confusion and personal reclamation entices, ensnares and enmeshes the reader. It is proof that an author can create a work of art that is deserves the largest audience without compromising the integrity of her craft. This novel signals Shapiro's triumphant emergence as an important interpreter of contemporary American life.
Through the eyes of her protagonist Rachel Jensen, Shapiro beckons us to enter the word of "otherness," where there exists a radical deviation from the normal, sustaining routines which compose many family histories. To Rachel, things that previously brought delight now "feel like a slap in the face" by people who "have not been swallowed up whole by the earth." Rachel asks, "How many women...have watched their world shatter...as if it were a glass globe?" How many marriages have seen the fissures of doubt become chasms of mistrust and disbelief? How many children, previously the source of life in the fabric of a family, have become unknowing perpetrators of unfixable destruction?
It is not only Kate Jensen, the anguished daughter of devoted parents Ned and Rachel, who is constricted in a "tourniquet of anger and guilt." A tragic accident involving Kate's infant brother sends the Jensen family into a vortex of familial disintegration. The Jensens face internal and external pressures; if it is not the explosive impact of Kate's assignation of responsibility, then it is the implosive consequences of guilt, remorse and doubt that ravage the once cohesive family. As their youngest son, Josh, recovers tentatively from his accident, Shapiro gives us no such assurances that Ned and Rachel will.
Reading "Family Life" is like navigating a fragile vessel through iceberg-strewn waters. Not only are there surface obstacles to overcome, beneath the surface loom huge dangers, most unknown, not only to the reader, but to Ned and Rachel as well. As do Ned and Rachel, we know something significant, something terribly altering, as occurred to their daughter during a summer stay at camp. But what was it? Is their daughter just in a transitory phase of adolescent angst or has something more ominous, more calamitous happened to her? Through Rachel's eyes, we witness the disappearance of trust, hope and love and wonder if they can ever be recaptured. To whom does a mother owe allegiance in a time of unprecedented crisis: her daughter or her husband? Are doubt and questioning the same things as disloyalty and disbelief?
If these questions are not absorbing enough, Shapiro also forces us to examine our own assumptions about family coherence. Is happiness illusory; can the Jensens capture what they once appeared to possess as a birthright? Is personal redemption worth the cost if the price is losing a husband or a daughter? How many of us have Solomonic wisdom regarding our own children; how much of their internal lives are unknown to us?
Cross-cutting narratives, enhanced by exquisite dialogue, give "Family History" enormous momentum. Shapiro never relinquishes her hold on us, never provides the easy answer, never permits her characters to become clichés. Instead, this magnificent writer prefers complexities to certainties, subtleties to the obvious, the unspoken to the said. The result is a novel of incredible psychological power, emotional intensity and moral integrity.
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