My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I really enjoyed this. It’s a fast-paced read and the tension between the characters keeps pulling you through the story! I started it for book club and then ADHD happened and I forgot all about it for a few months, very glad I picked it up again and this time just devoured it. I love the exploration of family and sibling rivalry and loyalty, but also the different motivations for remaining loyal to someone with whom you have a difficult and complex relationship. There was enough backstory to fill in the blanks, and to infer a lot of the motives that the narrator had and didn’t explicitly talk about, and I loved the way it left things open and didn’t sacrifice the pacing for info dumps or introspection.
Not that it lacked any of that – the whole book is quiet, contained, and the action in it is mostly off-page, since the narrator is the one with the routine and quiet personal life. That just makes the gap between the sisters more intense and adds to the sense of difference between them.
Read this if:
– you like fast, light-toned reads about darker subject matter
– you’re ok to read books that deal with domestic abuse (physical) towards wife and children, the punishment for which is hinted at
– you like unreliable narrators, and stories told in a mix of longer and shorter sections that feed smoothly into the whole picture like a jigsaw puzzle, so you can see the whole shape if you read between the lines as well as the lines themselves
– you want a reflective, tense story about siblings and the nature of twisted sibling relationships, disappointed/thwarted/unrequited love, and the complex adulthood pain of being eclipsed and disbelieved simply by not being the ‘pretty sister’, rather than an action-packed gorefest or police procedural (it’s neither of these)
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