Happy Family by Tracy Barone
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
When we first meet Cheri Matzner, she is moments away from being born. Her drug addicted mother has hobbled into the hospital in the throes of active labour; after Cheri has been born she will slip out into the rain. That will be the last we hear of her. Cheri will be taken in by a foster family for a few months, then adopted by a married couple desperate to heal from their own tragedy. A hop, skip and a jump later and Cheri is forty years old. Her marriage is strained, she’s been on fertility treatments for a year, her academic career is on shaky ground after a complaint of religious discrimination by one of her students, the son of one of the university’s wealthy donors, and the burgeoning Iraq war is threatening her hopes to translate some ancient tablets unearthed recently in the Middle East. Then things really go south. It’s a train derailment of a story. Nothing exploded but several cars have definitely come off the tracks. Despite all these problems, the bulk of Barone’s novel is concerned with only one tragic revelation. It’s eventually resolved. But little else is and Matzner has hardly started to grow as a person by the time you flip the last page. The writing is sexually and sometimes violently explicit and often positively portrays substance abuse. Happy Family is either a warmhearted, witty and honest novel or a trite, preachy, and ultimately unsatisfying glimpse into one woman’s fender-bender of a life, depending on your attitude and whether you got a good breakfast before you sat down to read it.
Tree Slices 
And that, my friend, is reader response literary theory in a nutshell. Thanks for your concision.
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