Top Five Saturday: Books Featuring Sibling Relationships

How far would you go to protect your sister?

Korede protects her sister to an extreme length including cleaning up the scene and disposing of the bodies of the men she has killed. The opening lines are wonderful:

Ayoola summons me with these words—Korede, I killed him.
I had hoped I would never hear those words again.

But how will she react when Ayoola’s toxic and dangerous relationships with men start to impinge on Korede’s own life and draw in a man she loves?

Braithwaite really explores that co-dependent sisterly relationship so well! And explores some of the reasons that may lie behind it, within a vivid Nigerian setting.

Based on the Sophocles’ Antigone, the first written but third in order of the Theban plays, it is clear that family is likely to be significant! This is a family born of Oedipus and Jocasta, son and husband, mother and wife!

Shamsie depicts Isma and Aneeka’s relationship so beautifully! Difficult and protective and suspicious – and their brother Parvaiz who was groomed into joining ISIS in Syria.

Oh those final powerful chapters! My heart still aches!

One of the lovely things in this book was the conflict between the Richardson family of four siblings – Isabelle, Lexie, Trip and Moody – and the single mother Mia and her only daughter Pearl.

The way that Pearl seems to yearn for and seek out the sibling relationships that she seems to miss, inserting herself and knitting herself into the Richardson family, whilst Izzy detatched herself from it…

Izzy’s newfound fascination with Mia proved lasting. Instead of sequestering herself in her bedroom with her violin, she would walk the mile and a half to the house on Winslow right after school, where Mia would be hard at work. She would watch Mia, learning to frame a shot, develop film, make a print. Pearl, meanwhile, did the exact reverse, walking with Moody to his house, lounging in the sunroom with the three oldest Richardson children.

This is a wonderfully visceral and unsettling – unheimlich – depiction of the notorious Lizzie Borden murders in America.

Lizzie’s father and step-mother are discovered brutally murdered on August 4th 1892 and Lizzie was accused of their murder.

The novel opens on the same day and discovery of the murder and Lizzie is clearly different in some ways. The joy of the novel is her relationship with her older sister Emma – simultaneously loving intimate and desperate to become independent. Schmidt’s writing almost shows the two girls merging together physically

For a novel that begins with “WHEN I WAS BORN, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins” the notion of family is likely to be critical.

In terms of siblings, Circe (sorceress and pharmakis) has a dangerous collection! Her sister is Pasiphaë, who compelled Daedalus to help her fornicate with a bull and bore the minotaur, which Circe helps to deliver. Her brother is Perses dabbles in darker magics and necromancy and “conjures souls into flesh again”. And, he becomes truly monstrous: as Pasiphaë says “You know nothing of Perses. Do you know how I had to keep him happy? The things I had to do?”