The Sisters – A Book Review

I love to read.  I mean really, really love it.  I love to go to Amazon.com and type in the name of a good book I’ve just finished and then scroll down to see what “other people who read that book have read.”  Then I write the author and title on a sticky note and go to the library, armed with three or four books to check out.

I also enjoy just perusing.  I always stop by the section of new books, two-week check-out, to see if any titles, covers or authors look good.  That’s where I found my newest read, The Sisters by Nancy Jensen.  It’s a bit difficult to describe the book and I don’t want to read how others have described it for an idea so I’m going to give it my best and hope I make sense.  This book starts out with two sisters, Bertie (Alberta) and Mabel Fischer.  Their father died of the flu shortly before being deployed,  in 1918.  After that their mother remarried and eventually gave birth to a son.  Both mother and son died during childbirth.  Bertie and Mabel were left to be raised by their stepfather, James Butcher.

Mabel was 5 years older than Bertie, who had a young courter named Wallace.  When things turn bad in the home, Mabel and Wallace formulate a plan to run away, only they don’t tell Bertie about it.  Rather, they plan it on Bertie’s 8th grade graduation and send a friend with a note telling her to meet them at the train station immediately.  Angry that nobody showed up she didn’t accept the note and instead ran home.

The rest of the story is about what happened to each sister; specifically following the lineage of each girl, with each daughter having more daughters.  When I opened the book every evening, I took my bookmark and placed it at the front of the book, where the family tree was, so I could refer back to it as needed.  The book starts in 1927 and ends in 2007, and each chapter is a story in and of itself.  Never did one chapter flow into the other.  I found myself engrossed with each story, whether it be about someone I had read about or a new character, but I never got closure to each chapter.  Instead, the following chapter would take place between one and eight years later.

The whole book I’m finding myself waiting and wondering if Mabel and Bertie ever find each other and make peace, while watching each subsequent generation dealing with the dysfunction of the prior one.  Everyone had demons and jealousies and nobody was satisfied and everyone seemed angry with someone else.  Every single story I enjoyed, but I didn’t enjoy just reading story after story without ending; without closure.

Can I recommend the book?  I thought about this long and hard yesterday before I was even finished, and I think my answer is no.  Is there ever closure between the sisters? Although I can’t recommend the book I don’t know that you won’t read it, so I can’t answer that.  Like I said, the book had me in its clutches.  Each story I knew would eventually be referenced again, albeit 12 or 14 years later with only the familial results.  Was this a hard to put down book?  Yes.  This is why I am conflicted.

You can find this and all of my other reviews on Goodreads (click on the button of books  with the G above on the right), along with several other recommendations, suggestions, and ‘do not reads.’