The weird story about a weird family: Mark Haddon’s The Red House: A Novel, reviewed

                                                        Image: Goodreads

Juanita Amaya

When I first started reading this book it didn’t make any sense. I wanted to stop reading it

because I couldn't understand it. I couldn't understand how it worked, and how everything was

organized, because I had never read a book like this.

As I mentioned in the headline, it’s weird but in a good sense; once you start getting all of the

family drama, it gets extremely interesting, and there’s something about how the story is

written that makes it so simple yet so amusing. For example, the book never explicitly

explained the family relationships, so they're all family: it starts with two siblings, the sister,

Angela, and the brother, Richard. Angela is married to Dominic and they have 3 children, Alex,

Daisy and Benjamin; Angela also had a daughter named Karen which died because she was born

with a disease called sirenomelia.

Now let’s move to Richard; he was first married to another woman and the marriage didn't work

Out, so he remarried Louisa, and Louisa had a daughter with her first husband, named Melissa.

This book is weirdly realistic. What I mean is that everything you read could happen to anyone

but it’s also something very peculiar, because I don't think it's a normal situation anyone

could be ever put in. The book explores what happens in unhappy families, families that are

not close, and very troubled. Everyone seems like a stranger, because they don't communicate;

they don't trust each other.

One thing I found pretty interesting was the fact that towards the end of the book the story

was simply fading, that somehow they have tried to fix their relationships and their trauma

but as the story wraps up, it's like everything they've tried to fix and do just vanishes. It

doesn't matter. Maybe to the author this has a deeper meaning, but to me it felt vague and

empty.