I received a gifted copy of this book courtesy of the publisher. All thoughts are my own.

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know how much I love a good story about a dysfunctional family. So, naturally, when I was offered a copy of this one, I didn’t hesitate. I enjoyed it, but when I finished, I found myself feeling a little meh. Didn’t hate it, didn’t love it.

The story spans two generations and is bookended by funerals, which tells you something about the tone. We open with estranged sisters Alice and Hanna being forced back into the same room after years of not speaking. From there, the book pulls back to show us how we got here, starting with their mother Celia and her own relationship with her sister Katy. Growing up, Katy was the pretty one who charmed everyone, while Celia was quieter and often pushed aside. Then, in her teenage years, Katy started to change. Slowly at first, and then all at once, until a diagnosis arrived that consumed the family’s energy and attention and left Celia to figure things out largely on her own. When she has her own kids, including twins Alice and Hanna and a brother Michael who exists in a permanent state of disapproval, her parenting reflects everything she dealt with in her past. The cycle keeps going, as cycles do, and Hanna eventually starts unraveling in ways that echo what happened with Katy decades before.

Honestly, there’s a lot to like here. The writing is sharp, and the wry British humor threaded through the whole thing is exactly the type of humor that I love. The ability to find something drily funny in situations that are also quietly painful, always tickles me. The characters are rich and complicated, and one of the things I appreciated most was that the book doesn’t just focus on Alice and Hanna. Every member of this family gets time under the proverbial microscope giving us a closer look at why they are the way they are.

But honestly, for all the big feelings these characters carry around about each other, when I actually looked at what caused the rifts and the estrangements, none of it felt that weighty. The family is absolutely dysfunctional, but the dysfunction mostly comes from petty grievances and nobody ever just talking about what’s bothering them. When things do come to a head, the root causes tend to be misunderstandings rather than actual acts of betrayal. I kept waiting for something to happen that would justify the scale of the resentment, and it never quite landed as heavily as I expected. The story wandered in places too, and without a stronger central conflict to anchor things, I found my attention drifting along with it.

Still, it’s worth reading if you’re drawn to British literary fiction with complicated family dynamics and a dry sense of humor. I just wanted more fire under all that smoke.