Many thanks to Transworld Publishers for giving
me a review copy off NetGalley
Everyone loves a
trier; it is not always enough to do just enough, or even to excel at the
things we do well – we need to do more.
It is seen as being brave to do this; a noble charge to go beyond the
call of duty and try to do as much as you can.
This can, however, become problematic when it comes to the arts. Try too much here and things can lose focus
and edge. Of course you want to create
something multi-faceted, but there is a line, however hard is sometimes to see
and even harder to judge – and Sisterland
is right on it.
Sisterland is American author Curtis Sittenfeld’s fourth book and is the tale of a
pair of twins: Daisy (who also goes by Kate) and Vi who, for want of a better
word, have psychic powers. It is a story
of their lives, from birth to the present day, and shows how these powers
affected them, and how two people with such similarities can grow to be such
different people, and yet be so similar at the same time.
The story-telling is
split between flashbacks that are chronological from their birth and forwards
to a few years behind the present, and the story happening in the present where
Vi has predicted a massive earthquake to hit their city of St Louis and the
drama that occurs from this. The story
flits between them at whim, keeping you on your toes, and
contrasting the changing relationship between the sisters in the present and in
the past.
Daisy is the ‘normal’
one of the two. She grows up as a fairly
typical teenager, struggling to fit in and finding solace in her serial
monogamous relationships with guys she doesn’t hugely like but make her feel
safe. In the present she is a suburban
stay-at-home mum with 2.4 kids and a picket fence who spends her life caring
for those kids. To distance herself from
her childhood, which was not particularly happy, she goes by her middle name of
Kate and given that she takes her husband’s name after being married, this
means she has an all-new name in the present – symbolic of her attempts to
leave her past behind.
She is the narrator of
the story and this is one the books great strengths. Kate is not perfect. I don’t mean that she is basically perfect
but makes mistakes thanks to misunderstandings; I mean that in many ways she is
actually quite prejudiced and often acts in a malicious way. She is still a very sympathetic character,
but she is greatly flawed, making her a far more interesting character.
Vi is the more eccentric. Unlike Kate who is ashamed of her powers and
tries to wish them away, she embraces them and even makes a career out of
them. She is a little frustrating at times, both for the characters and for the reader, but she is genuine, if selfish.
She was the wild-child of the two: college dropout, drinking and drugs
but now is tamer. Her announcement that an
earthquake was to destroy the city forces the two together.
The ‘psychic’ powers
that they have are dealt similarly to how Henry’s time-shifting powers are
dealt with in Audrey Niffenegger’s brilliant The Time Traveller’s Wife.
This is far from a sci-fi/fantasy book – it is a book about family and relationships
that happen to have an element of fantasy as a plot point. It is left ambiguous how much control they
have over it and how it generally manifests itself, though Vi talks of a
mystical ‘Guardian’ that speaks to her.
For me the book is at
its strongest when dealing with the story in the present. The story of the media storm surrounding them
as the country seems enthralled and amused at this curious tale brings out the
differences in the two sisters and how they interact with the world. It brings out the divisions in what seems
otherwise to be a solid marriage and causes the past to collide with
present. The attempts of Kate to live a
normal life as a parent of small children while this all goes on is really
wonderful, and testament to an author with prodigious talent. The story has many intermingled one-on-one
relationships: Kate and Vi, Kate and her husband Jeremy, Jeremy and his colleague
Courtney, Courtney and her stay-at-home husband Hank, and Hank and Kate. These relationships are all very strong but
are deeply personal between each pair and this leads to difficulties as
sometimes others feel like they are on the outside looking in.
The flashbacks are
vital to the story as they show how and why Kate and Daisy have changed over
the years and have reached the position in which they find themselves in the
present. These are well dispersed throughout
and are well told but I do feel there are rather too many of them. Sometimes I feel like Sittenfeld had not
decided which was the main part of the tale: the present or the past. I happen to think that the present was more
interesting and thus had to be supported by the flashbacks, but this was not
really the case.
The biggest problem
with this book, however, is the amount
of issues that Sittenfeld decides to chuck in.
She has a very interesting story here, about family relationships, about
how twins can lead diverging lives, about the difficulties of juggling family
responsibilities with parenting and living a life, not to mention the psychic
powers and how to live with it in a skeptical world – yet she then tries to
throw more things into the mix such as racial discrimination through her friend
Hank as well as the ethics of abortion among other things. The book just became a
little less tight and lost crucial focus at a time when it really needed to be
building to the big finish, and this is a big shame.
That said though I
have to say this is still an impressive book.
The plot idea hit on a very interesting concept and this was executed
very well. The characters are rich and
well developed and though the story does lack a little bit of realism with
regard to the worldwide reaction to the prediction among other things, this can
be overlooked. What I found harder to
overlook was some of the superfluous detail, but this does not fully detract
from Sittenfeld’s deep breaking down of the dynamics of family life and of the
folly of attempting to escape your childhood and your destiny.
7.5/10
Favourite Quotes
“She would say that we
create our own reality – that the truth, ultimately, is what we choose to
believe”
“That was the
nastiest, most elemental math, made no less ugly for its undeniability”
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