Book Review: The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson
Narrator: Therese Plummer
Published by Ecco on August 9, 2011
Genres: Fiction, Contemporary Fiction
Pages: 320
Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
Format: Audiobook
Goodreads
Overal Rating:

Mr. and Mrs. Fang called it art.
Their children called it mischief.
Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist’s work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents’ madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents’ strange world.
When the lives they’ve built come crashing down, brother and sister have nowhere to go but home, where they discover that Caleb and Camille are planning one last performance -– their magnum opus -– whether the kids agree to participate or not. Soon, ambition breeds conflict, bringing the Fangs to face the difficult decision about what’s ultimately more important: their family or their art.

This didn’t work for me. I was looking forward to this book, as I quite liked Nothing To See Here. The main story is intertwined with flashbacks to specific family events. I found these flashbacks boring and repetitive. I understand that it was done to illustrate how dysfunctional the family relationships were, but the situations became so absurd that I found myself tuning out and wanting to continue the main story. I knew the parents were going to disappear, and I was impatiently waiting for this to happen, as they were really annoying people, and I wanted to know how trauma was going to show up for both children when the parents were gone. It turns out the parents only go missing about halfway, so for me, the buildup felt very slow, and the aftermath felt underwhelming. There were a couple of funny moments, but in the end, they ended up being more bittersweet.

I think everyone in this book was a horrible person, and their characteristics were so exaggerated that they felt more like caricatures than real people; they were dehumanized. I couldn’t care for any of them, even after Ann and Baxter suffered so much due to having monsters as parents.

Story (Plot)
Narration
Overall: