Sister Dear: No more drama in my life

DON'T BOTHER

Oh my god, the melodrama! The main character just endlessly whinges and laments her own self-hatred, plays her mother's cruel voice over and over in her head, goes on sickening binges of emotional overeating and purging; and then flagellates herself. It all seems so obvious and tediously overblown. Plus the villains in the story -- her mother, her sister, her biological father -- are all such cardboard cut-outs of shallowness and direct cruelty. I keep giving up and going on to other books, so I may never finish this one...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where Reason Ends: What would my dead son say to me?

Image
WORTH READING, especially if you, too, have lost a child. I started this spare, heartrending book over again as soon as I finished it. Not because it told a gripping story; it didn’t, which would usually make me lose interest. But it is a deep book whose meaning is murky and I thought a second reading might reveal more to me. As it turns out, the book has taken on an impossible task, trying to illuminate the mystery of how we communicate with the dead, and because it can’t really do that, it left me dissatisfied.  I started it over hoping I would get it’s profound message more clearly the second time. But ultimately, I think that searching is the book’s lesson: once it’s the dead with whom we are communicating, we are always going to be dissatisfied.  Li’s 16 yo son died by suicide and this book, called a novel but really a sort-of memoir, is about a mother talking to her dead 16 yo in “the after time.” Her son is biting, pragmatic, and sarcastic; she doesn’t put comforting wo...
Read more

The Vanishing Half: Twins who choose different paths learn the same lesson

Image
 WORTH READING for sure. This was a good, multi-generational story with somewhat flat characters that explores the role colorism plays inside the larger issue of racism.  Twin sisters raised in a Southern town of light-skinned blacks (and such towns really existed, apparently) run away at 16 and wind up going two very separate ways. One twin marries a very dark Black man and has a blue-black child of whom she knows her mother will not approve. And the other pretends to be white to get a job and then just decides to stay that way, marrying the boss and never seeing her family again. While it may seem that the first twin has the harder life, as her husband turns out to be abusive and she must return to her colorist town with her extra black child, it is the "passing" twin for whom we feel the most sorry, as she betrays her family and her values to keep her secret. The passing twin acts racist and won't let her own children play with black kids for fear of what the neighbors...
Read more