Search - Family Pictures

Good, not as good as The Good Mother, but good. I recommend this to any family who has an autistic child in the family. It really shows how that impacts the family on a whole.

Engrossing, sometimes heart wrenching, but excellent reading. I couldn,t put it down. GinaK

Family Pictures is a book that doesn't let go. You may want to read it twice: the first time to allow yourself to be swept up in caring and aching for this family, then again to savor Sue Miller's words and grasp their full impact. The story is told through the eyes of four different family members, and the complexity of family relationships is brought home through the various ways different characters interpret and react to the same events. The catalyst for this family's dysfunction is an autistic child, and each family member deals with Randall's mute power in his or her own way. The psychiatrist father withdraws emotionally and physically, unable to bear his family's pain as he does his patients'. The mother manifests her love, guilt, and shame through compulsive achievements, from wallpapering to having three more "perfect" children to compensate for Randall. The children foray into rebellious acts of teens in the 1960s. Each character comes to realize with varying degrees of poignancy "that each child represents such risk, such blind daring on its parents' parts - such possibility for anguish and pain - that each one's existence was kind of a miracle." This warm, gritty, realistic tale is about such daring

The whole world could not have broken the spirit and strength of the Eberhardt family of 1948. Lainey is a warm and slightly eccentric mother. David is a good, sarcastic, yet cool-tempered father. Two wonderful children round out the perfect picture. Then the next child arrives - and life is never the same again. Over the next forty years, the Eberhardt family struggles to survive a floodtide of upheaval and heartbreak, love and betrayal, passion and pain... hoping they can someday heal their hearts and return to the perfect family in the pictures from the past.

The whole worl could not have broken the spitit and strength of the Eberhart family of 1948. Lainy is a warm and slightly eccentric mother. David is a good, sarcastic, yet cool tempered father. Two wonderful children round out the perfect picture. Over the next forty years, the Eberhart family struggle to survive a floodtide of upheavel and heartbreak, love and betrayal, passion and pain..hoping one day to return to the operfect family in the pictures from the past.

rescued from the Sherman Oaks, CA. Public Library's Books for a Dime shelf, for the purpose of trading. Registered with BookCrossing.com