A disappointment.. - Rated 
Waiting for something to happen - right up to the last page...
Oh dear..
Disappointing - Rated 
The book is very fragmented and seems to go nowhere.
The writing is good but I fail to understand the views that it is so funny. Additionally the children are like no children I have ever known and the parents only rarely resemble "real" people. I was expecting more.
Stylist of Grinding Despair - Rated 
In his impressive novel SOME HOPE, St. Aubyn's shows a young Patrick Melrose trying to cope with the actions and legacy of his repellent and snobbish father. In MOTHER'S MILK, the sequel, St. Aubyn shows Patrick, now in his forties, trying to cope with two mothers--Eleanor, his own mother, who is lingering pathetically in a nursing home, and Mary, his wife and the mother of his two young sons.
St. Aubyn has crafted these very different mothers so that they have equivalent effects on Patrick. Here, the young and middle-aged Eleanor filled her life with altruistic pursuits, ignoring her son. In contrast, Mary's altruistic and all-consuming activity is motherhood, which once again leads to the abandonment of Patrick.
In examining Patrick and these two mothers, St. Aubyn shows considerable skills as a stylist and novelist. The skills show to their best when a character is in contemplative mode--say, the frustrated and lonely Patrick drinking at the beach or Mary with a few precious moments to herself as her demanding younger son naps. This is what I mean:
"She sometimes felt she was about to forget her own existence completely. She had to cry to reclaim herself. People who didn't understand thought that her tears were the product of a long suppressed and mundane catastrophe, her terminal exhaustion, her huge overdraft or her unfaithful husband, but they were in fact a crash course in the necessary egotism of someone who needed to get a self back in order to sacrifice it once again."
At the same time, the ability to make such observations causes occasional lapses. These are most apparent in numerous conversations, unreal in their articulateness, or in the renderings of children and their profound awareness. In both cases, these read as if St. Aubyn just couldn't pass up making a brilliant or exquisite remark. These are lapses in discipline, not control, and turn St. Aubyn's articulateness against the quality of his work.
Regardless, there is much pleasure to be found in this extremely well written novel.
Amazingly Overrated - Rated
This book is, apaprently, the overlooked true winner of the Booker Prize, if you believe what you read in the weekend broadsheets and on Amazon. But it was simply not that good. As several other reviewers on here have said, it was apparently 'social satire' but the world in the book is one that simply does not exist. No-one seemed to have a job or to have to do anything apart from agonise over their children and relationships. The children's voices being so developed were obviously an attempt to demonstrate the self-obsession even of the young members of this family, but the writing was scarcely credible nonetheless, and the author went out of his way to shoehorn in obvious 'satire' at the expense of credibility.
And that's before we get to the section set in America. Which was only put in there for easy cheap shots at the country - the fat person on the plane was an indication of the woefully poor stuff to follow, with the pizza being universally regarded as disgusting compared to the 'beautiful' stuff in France, which was presented with absolutely no detachment of the author from the narrative voice; or the tedious, seemingly obligatory argument about Iraq which of course all the intended readers will agree with.
I had high hopes for this book but for such an apparently meticulous 'prose stylist' it felt like it was written in about a fortnight.
Saying that it is better than Kiran Desai's novel which has an even more glaringly obvious anti-American agenda. Sarah Waters was truly robbed.
Mother's Milk - second helpings - Rated 
As soon as I finished the book, I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it all over again, savouring all the wit and wisdom of its characters - particularly Patrick. I am trying to think how I could incorporate his hilarious line about Holland into conversation. (I would give Mr St Aubyn due credit, of course!)
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