From Publishers Weekly
Warm with nostalgia and flecked with the subtle fantasy that seasons nearly all his fiction, Joyce's latest novel (after Smoking Poppy) is an uneven mix of the charming and the self-consciously peculiar. The setting is Coventry, England, in the years after WWII, where the surviving Vine family-mother Martha, her seven grown daughters and their various offspring-are all trying to build lives out of the ruins left by Nazi bombs. The bittersweet events center on young Frank, the illegitimate son of psychologically unstable youngest daughter Cassie, who like his mum has inherited a fey streak that makes him receptive to precognition and restless spirits. As Frank and Cassie bounce from household to household, cared for by different family members, their peregrinations evoke in miniature the British postwar experience, mirrored in the lives of Cassie's siblings: one is married to a man who relives the war through his affair with a dead soldier's wife; another is a politically liberal participant in a comically self-destructing socialist commune. Virtually plotless, the book unfolds as a series of vignettes, interrelated loosely through shared, affectionately realized characters and seriocomic treatments of death and (especially) sexuality. Frank's supernatural experiences, which include frequent sessions with a mysterious figure he refers to cryptically as "The-Man-Behind-The-Glass," are hints that he shares hi relatives' powers. Indeed, the subtlety with which Joyce presents clairvoyant episodes makes them entirely credible in a novel that celebrates the strong bond of family and the deep well of sensitivity on which they all draw. In the end, this is a haunting story about flawed but good-hearted people who bear the hallmarks of eccentricity but also the beneficent aura of human connectedness. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
In this moving novel, Joyce traces the boyhood of Frank Vine, born into a loving and ramshackle family in the English countryside during World War II. The product of a brief liaison between an American GI and a local woman, Frank is marked with an extrasensory gift that he shares with his matriarchal grandmother and his emotionally unstable mother. Shortly after his birth, Frank's mother is deemed unfit to care for him, so his grandmother makes the executive decision that his care will be divided among his six aunts, each highly unconventional in her own right. During the next 10 years, Frank makes his home at a farm, a commune, and a makeshift mortuary, slowly finding his place in his eccentric but loving family. Joyce's emotional tale skirts sentimentality by presenting the family warts and all: each of the sisters is a complex and contradictory figure, and Joyce fully examines the consequences of the small feuds and squabbles that characterize a close-knit family. A beautifully written tale that entwines domestic drama with magic realism. Brendan Dowling
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Isabel Allende
I have not been so charmed by a novel in a long time.


Review
Time Out, London Joyce is brilliant....[The Facts of Life] is a book about beginnings that are also continuities, and about ordinary lives stranger than casual inspection knows.


Book Description
Graham Joyce directs his immense storytelling gifts in an altogether new direction and achieves the most ambitious and psychologically captivating work of his career. As he chronicles the story of the Vine family, the prize-winning author of Smoking Poppy and Indigo invests a bygone era with great authenticity and powerful atmosphere. Set during and immediately after World War II, The Facts of Life follows the fortunes of Frank Arthur Vine, the result of a tryst between his mother Cassie and an American GI. Because Cassie is too unreliable and unstable to act as his proper guardian, Frank is brought up alternately by his mother's six very different sisters -- each singularly idiosyncratic -- and by his beguiling and charismatic grandmother. But, as his mother knows, and his grandmother strongly suspects, Frank is no ordinary child. The Facts of Life takes place in Coventry, in the English Midlands, the notorious target of Hitler's fiercest bombing raid and, some nine centuries earlier, the scene of the infamous Lady Godiva's naked ride through the marketplace. Peopled with entrancing characters, it is an enormously affecting tale of family and sisterhood, of the kindness and the madness of women, of the fantastic breaking through in a troubled world.


About the Author
Graham Joyce is the author of Smoking Poppy, Indigo (a New York Times Notable Book of 2000), The Tooth Fairy (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998), Requiem, Dark Sister, and Dreamside. He lives in Leicester, England, with his wife and two children.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Set during and immediately after World War II, The Facts of Life follows the fortunes of Frank Arthur Vine, the result of a tryst between his mother Cassie and an American GI. Because Cassie is too unreliable and unstable to act as his proper guardian, Frank is brought up alternately by his mother's six very different sisters - each singularly idiosyncratic - and by his beguiling and charismatic grandmother." "But, as his mother knows, and his grandmother strongly suspects, Frank is no ordinary child." The Facts of Life takes place in Coventry, in the English Midlands, the notorious target of Hitler's fiercest bombing raid and, some nine centuries earlier, the scene of the infamous Lady Godiva's naked ride through the marketplace. Peopled with entrancing characters, it is an enormously affecting tale of family and sisterhood, of the kindness and the madness of women, of the fantastic breaking through in a troubled world.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Washington Post

Magical realism has its detractors these days, but don't dismiss it before you give a novel like this one a chance. Yes, it's odd; it's fey; it manipulates you; it's not really real. But who's to say, in the end, what's real and what isn't? — Zofia Smardz

Publishers Weekly

Warm with nostalgia and flecked with the subtle fantasy that seasons nearly all his fiction, Joyce's latest novel (after Smoking Poppy) is an uneven mix of the charming and the self-consciously peculiar. The setting is Coventry, England, in the years after WWII, where the surviving Vine family-mother Martha, her seven grown daughters and their various offspring-are all trying to build lives out of the ruins left by Nazi bombs. The bittersweet events center on young Frank, the illegitimate son of psychologically unstable youngest daughter Cassie, who like his mum has inherited a fey streak that makes him receptive to precognition and restless spirits. As Frank and Cassie bounce from household to household, cared for by different family members, their peregrinations evoke in miniature the British postwar experience, mirrored in the lives of Cassie's siblings: one is married to a man who relives the war through his affair with a dead soldier's wife; another is a politically liberal participant in a comically self-destructing socialist commune. Virtually plotless, the book unfolds as a series of vignettes, interrelated loosely through shared, affectionately realized characters and seriocomic treatments of death and (especially) sexuality. Frank's supernatural experiences, which include frequent sessions with a mysterious figure he refers to cryptically as "The-Man-Behind-The-Glass," are hints that he shares hi relatives' powers. Indeed, the subtlety with which Joyce presents clairvoyant episodes makes them entirely credible in a novel that celebrates the strong bond of family and the deep well of sensitivity on which they all draw. In the end, this is a haunting story about flawed but good-hearted people who bear the hallmarks of eccentricity but also the beneficent aura of human connectedness. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Acclaimed for his dark fantasies (Indigo; The Tooth Fairy), British author Joyce has less success with this historical novel, set during and after the 1940 bombing of Coventry, England. Young Frank Vine is the product of an air-raid fling between Cassie and an American GI. Because Cassie is incapable of caring for him, her mother, Martha, the weary matriarch of a family of seven grown girls, has her other daughters take turns at the task. Martha has the sight; she receives "knocks at the door"-ghosts warning her of the future-a gift that Frank, too, possesses. Cassie is even more prescient, predicting when the Germans will bomb the city by sensing radio signals. Cassie's frantic sexual energy during the Blitz and the vivid description of the Blitz itself are nearly enough to carry the novel. But it bogs down as Frank is shuttled from household to household, not trusted alone with the fey and wayward Cassie. Joyce could have omitted several sisters and side plots to make this a more focused, magical, gripping tale. For larger collections where modern fantasies are appreciated.-Christine Perkins, Burlington P.L., WA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews