Slacks for Ella Funt

Atkinson’s narrator, Ruby Lennox, is the real star here. The first line of the book is a brash declaration of her conception: “I exist!” She tells her story from conception to old age. Atkinson does a great job of matching the narrative voice and the level of knowledge consistent with Ruby’s age. As a baby and child, Ruby doesn’t completely understand what’s going on, and neither does the reader. As Ruby gets older, her understanding of past events fills in the gaps for the reader.
The history of five generations of Ruby’s family is brought in as footnotes to items in the main narrative, leading to a non-linear structure that I really enjoyed.
I didn’t like this quite as well as Atkinson’s recent literary mysteries, but it’s interesting to see what she was doing before she started with the mysteries.