To create a novel that is at once suffused with kindness and yet a page turner is a rare and wondrous thing. I can’t recommend Christopher Di Raddo’s The Family Way enough. It’s not a literary novel and it won’t gobsmack you with the beauty of its sentences nor the sophistication of its theoretical underpinnings . But it has characters you’ll recognise in places you’ll be familiar with wondering about things you might be wondering about now. It is a gentle, nuanced exploration of the importance of various kinds of families — the ones we make, the ones we’re excluded from, the ones we’re born into, the ones that are thrust on us, and, after being initially resistant to what I saw as the yuppyness of it all, I ended up being very moved by it. But the main reason I’m going on about it so is that I was gripped by a narrative propulsed by kindness. It’s Di Raddo’s second novel and I’ll bet it will find a big audience if marketed properly. Certainly those on the lookout for a hit TV mini-series would be smart to have a look.
José Arroyo
