7.6 /10 1 Votes
Language English Publication date September 2015 Dewey Decimal 813/.6 Page count 304 Country United States of America | 3.8/5 Goodreads Publisher Gallery/Scout Press Pages 304 Originally published 25 August 2015 Genre Fiction ISBN 9781476798172 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Fiction books A Brief History of Seven Kil, City on Fire, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, The Sellout, Avenue of Mysteries | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did You Ever Have a Family is the debut novel by American literary agent and author Bill Clegg, published in 2015.
Contents
Author bill clegg on did you ever have a family
Plot summary
The novel focuses on June Reid, a beautiful, rich Connecticut woman. On the night before her daughter’s wedding, June Reid loses her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and boyfriend in a tragic house fire. Grief stricken, she drives across the country to Washington. Over the course of her journey, details slowly emerge about what caused the fire and its impact on the community.
Characters
Reception
Did You Ever Have a Family received favourable reviews from, amongst others, The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Independent.
In The New York Times, Kaui Hart Hemmings called the novel "masterly" and "thoughtful", noting that it is the characters' "complicated pasts... far more than the immediate concerns of the present or the obvious burdens of grief" and "connection — the way people and their lives fuse" that Clegg is interested in exploring.
In the Financial Times, Suzi Feay noted that Clegg has "an eye for characters who cannot easily fit into the boxes that society has assigned" even if the main protagonist "June remains a puzzle, and hazily unconvincing". While praising Clegg for his ability to "not fall into the obvious trap of giving regular characters bigger vocabularies and more elaborate syntax than they would typically use", she also criticised his writing for being "generally plain and even unambitious", with the cast of characters' voices "not hugely differentiated".