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Summary
Summary
Just about everyone knows a family like the Radleys. Many of us grew up next door to one. They are a modern family, averagely content, averagely dysfunctional, living in a staid and quiet suburban English town. Peter is an overworked doctor whose wife, Helen, has become increasingly remote and uncommunicative. Rowan, their teenage son, is being bullied at school, and their anemic daughter, Clara, has recently become a vegan. They are typical, that is, save for one devastating exception: Peter and Helen are vampires and have for seventeen years been abstaining by choice from a life of chasing blood in the hope that their children could live normal lives.One night, Clara finds herself driven to commit a shocking and disturbingly satisfying act of violence, and her parents are forced to explain their history of shadows and lies. A police investigation is launched that uncovers a richness of vampire history heretofore unknown to the general public. And when the malevolent and alluring Uncle Will, a practicing vampire, arrives to throw the police off Clara's trail, he winds up throwing the whole house into temptation and turmoil and unleashing a host of dark secrets that threaten the Radleys marriage.The Radleysis a moving, thrilling, and radiant domestic novel that explores with daring the lengths a parent will go to protect a child, what it costs you to deny your identity, the undeniable appeal of sin, and the everlasting, iridescent bonds of family love. Read it and ask what we grow into when we grow up, and what we gain and lose when we deny our appetites.
Author Notes
Matt Haig was born on July 3, 1975 in Sheffield. He attended the University of Hull where he studied English and History. He has since become a British novelist and journalist. He has authored both fiction and non-fiction for children and adults. His non-fiction title "Reasons to Stay Alive" became a Sunday Times bestseller. His bestselling children's novel, A Boy Called Christmas is now being adapted for film. His other works include: The Last Family in England, The Dead Fathers Club, Shadow Forest, The Possession of Mr. Cave, How to Stop Time and Runaway Troll.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This witty vampire novel from British author Haig (The Possession of Mr. Cave) provides what jaded fans of the Twilight series need, not True Blood exactly, but some fresh blood in the form of a true blue family. Dr. Peter Radley and his wife, Helen, have fled wild London for the village of Bishopthorpe, where they live an outwardly ordinary life. The Radleys, who follow the rules of The Abstainer's Handbook (e.g., "Be proud to act like a normal human being"), haven't told their 15-year-old vegan daughter, Clara, and 17-year-old son, Rowan, who's troubled by nightmares, that they're really vampires. A crisis occurs when a drunken classmate of Clara's, Stuart Harper, attacks her on her way home from a party and inadvertently awakens the girl's blood thirst. Peter's call for help to his brother, Will, a practicing vampire, leads to scary consequences. The likable Clara and Rowan will appeal to both adult and teen readers. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The Radleys Peter, Helen, and their two teenagers, Clara and Rowan live outwardly in domestic bliss, but it comes at a price: Peter and Helen are abstainers, vampires who view blood drinking as an addiction, and keeping up the facade has strained their marriage. They've kept the truth from their children, but this backfires when Clara's vegan diet (dangerous for abstainers, who need meat) causes uncontrollable blood lust, culminating in her ripping a boy to shreds. Enter Uncle Will, an unrepentant vampire, whose subtle and dangerous charm brings even more trouble. This is a dark domestic drama about a loving but dysfunctional family that just happens to be vampires, though delicious moments of gore maintain its horror connection. Excerpts from The Abstainer's Handbook, which the Radley's rigidly follow, cleverly mimic self-help manuals, and Haig's sly digs at suburbia's forced banality and conformity are on target. As Rowan says, Everyone represses everything. . . . We're middle-class and we're British. Repression is in our veins. A white-picket-fence-style happy ending caps off this unusual blended story.--Hutley, Krista Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE vampire novel is a crowded genre these days. To distinguish itself, a book will need inventiveness, wit, beauty, truth and a narrative within which these attributes can flourish. "The Radleys," by Matt Haig, has got them, if sometimes in alloyed form. Let's start with the premise. A nuclear family of four vampires - mom, dad, sister, brother - live in the English suburb of Bishopthorpe. The parents know what they are, and have concealed this knowledge from their teenage kids, who, inadvertently abstaining from the blood they don't know they need to drink, suffer from nausea, insomnia, weakness, "photodermatosis" and mortifying high school unpopularity. Then one night, attacked by a large ogre of a boy, the daughter discovers her true nature the hard way, precipitating a vampire family crisis. Into this rushes the dad's dastardly but alluring brother, who freely does all the cruel, exciting things the parents have protected their children from and have painfully denied themselves for years. The stage is now set for the moral conflict that Haig adroitly develops. The moral stakes, so to speak, are spelled out in "The Abstainer's Handbook," a self-help guide for "blood addicts" who have chosen not to give in to their "overwhelming blood thirst" (or O.B.T. for short). Its anxious homilies and admonishments appear as epigraphs throughout the novel. Freud would appreciate its assertion that "civilization only works if instincts are suppressed," though he might warn against its methodology: "Confine your imagination." One instinctual activity that gets suppressed, at least in the Radleys' marriage, is sex, because sex leads to mutual blood sucking, which in turn leads to nonmutual blood sucking. As in many suburban marriages of story and song, the wife, Helen, has her foot on the brake while the husband, Peter, tries fruitlessly to work the accelerator. Sex is "just a hug in motion," he silently protests, "a bloodless piece of body friction," one of the novel's many fine instances of Haig's wit. As befits a vampire story, the wit tends to be sharp, and is often aimed at the mores and folkways of suburban life. An obnoxious neighbor (who, while making love to his wife, suddenly thinks of the polyethylene-covered sofa in his boyhood home) suspects the Radleys of crimes against humanity far worse than draining the blood from its neck: "They used to live in London and . . . they probably voted Liberal Democrat and they went to the theater a lot to see things that weren't musicals." Following Keats (who, in the world of this novel, was a vampire, as were "all the Romantics, except Wordsworth") I'll combine my observations about beauty and truth. There are lovely, incisive passages in "The Radleys." A teenager being whisked away from a party by her angry father "stares out at the hedges speeding by, wishing she could have been born something else, a little thrush or starling or something that could just fly away." This is especially striking because such creatures do fly away from this girl's best friends, the Radley kids, with whom her fate is intertwined. And here's another great image: when Clara Radley returns home after her accidental first vampire experience, her brother, Rowan, sees her "covered in what looked like blood. And she was really covered, the way a newborn baby is." In doing something ghastly, she has been reborn as an innocent, an economical and understated image of vampirism's moral ambiguity. ELSEWHERE, unfortunately, Haig tends towards overstatement and repetition. Many times an abstaining vampire longingly smells the blood beneath the skin of an unsuspecting human's wrist or neck; many times the sun bothers the vampires; animals flee from them; and the Radley parents must lie to humans about their true nature and past and current misdeeds. "The Abstainer's Handbook," for all its uptight charm, often repeats as instruction what has just been or is about to be narrated. This novel's central moral problem - that blood sucking is exhilarating yet morally wrong, while abstention is virtuous yet tedious and false - is sometimes hammered home all too explicitly and schematically. Mental states are too often simply announced rather than evoked: "Something was going wrong in Will's psyche"; "Rowan seems perturbed by this information"; "Helen is raw with shame." By the time I had arrived at someone's "untold fear," I wished the fear had in fact remained untold. Haig has said that he wrote "The Radleys" concurrently as a novel and a screenplay. With its striking visuals, snappy dialogue and high-energy plot, the story should make an appealing movie. But while the plot propels us forward, the novel's big themes tend to get repeated rather than developed. The element of this story that I found most moving, even more than the scary, thrilling, but by now familiar vampire stuff, was a wife's betrayal of her husband. It occurred long in the past, and remains unknown to him, but continues to reverberate in the marriage, as in this moment near the end of a painful argument: "In the small dark cavern she has made with her duvet, her uncontrollable self yearns deeply for that feeling she had years ago, when she had forgotten about all the problems in her life - work, the despairing visits to her dying father, and a wedding she didn't know she wanted." Here, Haig does justice to the effect of this betrayal on the souls of his characters - the startling pleasure and the lasting woe - proving himself a novelist of considerable seriousness and talent. Matthew Sharpe's latest novel is "You Were Wrong."
Library Journal Review
Dark humor pervades Haig's (The Possession of Dr. Cave) entertaining vampire family soap opera. While Helen was engaged to Peter Radley 17 years ago, his brother Will secretly whisked her off for one sex-filled "vampire conversion" night in Paris. A pregnant Helen then told Peter the baby was his, and together they decided to live like normal people and follow the guidelines set down by the Abstainer's Handbook, written for those who no longer wish to live the traditional vampire life. Complications arise as their children, Rowan (Will's biological son) and Clara, begin to acquire vampire characteristics. Clara is the first to change when one night a thuggish classmate attacks her. The fangs pop out, and Clara does what any vampire would naturally do. At last Helen agrees with Peter that it is time to explain their heritage to the children. At first the Radleys seem to be the stereotypical dysfunctional family, but each of them gradually shows a depth of character that helps them to pull together when outside forces attempt to destroy them. VERDICT This witty novel offers a refreshing take on an oversaturated genre. Already optioned by director Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), this is sure to attract reader attention. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/10.]-Patricia Altner, Columbia, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.