sisters

The Incident at New Providence

mandy — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

The Incident at New Providence begins with the uncomfortable reunion of two sisters who can fairly accurately be called Country Mouse and City Mouse. At that point, however, any resemblance to a cute children’s story comes to a screeching halt. Olivia Free-Woman has written a story with racism, sexism, sexual abuse, abortion, small town politics, and a lesbian heroine that feels entirely plausible. As with most entertaining fiction, the back story evolves throughout, leaving the reader intrigued without feeling too much in the dark. The action moves the story forward as Terri (City Mouse) discovers things she wishes she hadn’t about some of the people she grew up with, and her big sister Grace struggles to keep her from getting into trouble.

The Incident at New Providence isn’t so much a mystery as a story about two sisters whose reactions to the same childhood trauma took them in entirely different directions. The resentment and misunderstanding between them begins to dissolve as the assumptions they have made about each other for decades are proven wrong. Terri comes to town with the smug notion that she has grown up and moved on while her sister has remained in town to hide from reality. She quickly discovers that Grace possesses a quiet strength that leads her to stand by her convictions and work to make life better for the next generation. While many of the customs of this small town disgust Terri, including the strong divide between Black and White residents, it becomes clear that there is a delicate balance that the town has struck which allows an ugliness to exist beneath the surface.

The only complaint I have about The Incident at New Providence is that I finished reading it too quickly. At 142 pages, it is a slim volume to add to my library, but Free-Woman’s ability to tell such a powerful tale in so small a package is amazing. The author died in 2010 and all proceeds from the book go toward a scholarship fund she established to help elementary students in Phoenix, Arizona go to college.

Written by: Kari O'Driscoll, March 20th 2011

Two

mandy — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By The Chapin Sisters

Lake Bottom Records

I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that the ability to write a catchy pop song is a hereditary trait, in addition to being a skill developed over time. That definitely seems to be the case with Los Angeles sister duo Chapin Sisters. Their lineage is chock full of singer-songwriters, including their father, Tom Chapin, and their more well-known uncle, the late Harry Chapin, who wrote and performed “Cat’s In the Cradle.” With their self-produced second full-length release, fittingly titled Two, the Chapin Sisters prove themselves to be worthy predecessors, albeit ones in need of a bit more practice.

The pair has keen ears and seem to know something about what can make pop music truly transcendent. Remember a couple of years back, when it seemed like every indie artist and her mother was covering the Gnarls Barkley hit “Crazy?” That’s because the song had a great beat with familiar yet poignant lyrics—a winning combination for any pop classic. Similarly, the Chapin Sisters were one of many groups in the mid-aughts to cover a song made famous by Britney Spears. They first garnered a bit of buzz in 2006, with their heavenly slowcore folk version of Spears’ “Toxic.”

Abigail and Lily share duties on songwriting, as well as vocals, guitars, keyboards, and percussion; separately, Lily is on banjo and Abigail plays the flute. The album also features performances from Louis Stephens of Rooney (with whom The Chapin Sisters have recently toured), and Jesse Lee and Josh Diamond of New York experimental band Gang Gang Dance. The lyrics are chock full of sweet deceptively simple language, and often skirt that very fine line between effortlessly crafted enduring pop and too-familiar schmaltz. Every song seems to start out basic, with either just voices or sparse instrumentation, then starts to build up, taller and bigger with more sound – more horns, more percussion, more harmonies. It works well, so long as you choose to block out the fact that almost every song is following that formula.

Despite Two having been recorded in the New Jersey woods, there is a very Fleetwood Mac quality to The Chapin Sisters. Let me explain: Fleetwood Mac started as a British blues/folk band then, with the addition of Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, became known as the quintessential California band. As with The Mac, The Chapin Sisters combine tight harmonies, traditional British folk sounds, a vaguely haunted aesthetic and a gentle airiness. Excellent examples include “Sweet Light,” “Paradise,” and “Palm Tree.” Meanwhile, “Digging a Hole” sounds less Nicks-style “Gypsy” and more genuine world-music-style gypsy. The flute is put to good use on this track, which sounds like it should be sung around a campfire.

Overall, the songs on Two are the sort that make you want to stand in a the middle of a field or dark concert hall while wearing a long skirt that you grab at the corners as you swish and sway in place, set adrift on the ocean of sound.

Written by: M. Brianna Stallings, March 4th 2011

My Sister Chaos

farhana — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Laura Fergus

Spinifex Press

A woman leaves her country at the last minute, as a refugee in a civil war. She and her sister leave together and seek asylum in a new country where they will continue their lives. Laura Fergus’s wonderful first novel takes up the story of this woman (I) and her sister (the sister). We do not learn the sisters’ names. We do learn that they are twins and that they are no longer very young. We do not learn the country from which they came nor the country in which they sought asylum. We do not learn the city in which they live. We do not learn the name of the war that scarred them.

The story begins in Chapter 1 with our main narrator, the cartographer—the sister identified with “I.” We eventually learn that she is a highly skilled cartographer, and was well-respected in her native country. In her new country, she works at a level well below that from which she came. Her detachment from her job and her isolation afford her a great deal of time for her pet project: she is creating a map of her house.

Her map is of a specific kind: she is not simply drawing her house and its contents to scale. She has designated her drafting table as her Point of Beginning and she draws from that point to create her map. This means that, from that point, she measures distances and angles which, when completed, must add up to the whole with nothing missing and nothing left over. This kind of measuring can take into account previous boundaries, as well as histories of change and movement. As the story progresses, we find our protagonist agonizing over how to do just this. Beginning in Chapter 1 (the reader’s point of beginning, of a sort), the cartographer must find a way to include her sister and her sister’s chaos into the map she is making.

We do not meet the sister herself until the second part of the book. The sister’s chapters are fractions. We meet her in Chapter 12.5. She is not a whole number. The sister’s story is only ever mediated to us via her sister or an unknown narrator. However, it is the sister who reveals the cartographer and her map to us and to the cartographer. The cartographer herself, we learn, is herself not a whole number. In Chapter 21.75, the cartographer has a flashback. Her past comes creeping in and exceeds the precision the cartographer seeks. As the story progresses, the chapter numbers become increasingly fractured as the maps and the house and the sisters are found to exceed the sum of their measures. The cartographer abandons her map and begins to cut apart her house so it can match the map; the sister takes up the map and paints a new one. At the end of the book, the sisters have taken up the common project of destroying and recreating the house from the inside.

I cannot do justice to this book in such small space. It is marvelous. I’m still not sure I fully understand it, but it kept me up all night the night I read it and I look forward to rereading it.

Written by: kristina grob, January 13th 2011

I Am From Titov Veles (Jas Sum Od Titov Veles)

alicia — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

Directed by Teona Mitevska

Global Film Initiative

The film begins with a visual icon of the industrial world: the factory’s spires rising like a cathedral, emitting billows of smoke into the sky. Then, a woman’s legs, wrapped like a present in ribboned slippers and a skirt of delicate fabric. She is walking quickly along a wall; she is hurrying. Behind her, out of focus, a man rides on a machine in the factory yard. It becomes obvious that she is surrounded by a workers’ strike, and she sits down and suddenly notices a tiny bug on her hand. She is delighted, in awe. Her absorption with this tiny creature drowns out the noise around her, and she tilts her head back, breathing deeply.

I Am From Titov Veles is a film written and directed by Teona Mitevska, a Macedonian artist who graduated from NYU Tisch and now co-runs a family film company called Sisters and Brother Mitevski with her sister Latina, actress and star of Titov Veles, and her brother Vuk, art director and painter/sculptor who studied at Bennington college in Vermont. The film has won over fifteen international festival awards, and they are well earned. This is a precious film, a rare work of visual intensity and beauty as well as infinitely rich content.

It appears obvious that Teona Mitevska loves this film, these characters, and most of all this place. The film is “patriotic” in the truest sense: it expresses joy at the joyful parts of the place, and horror at that which is horrible. It is truly a film which replaces patriotic guns with a camera, and goes forth with purpose.

The story follows the youngest of three sisters, Afrodita (played by the sister Latina Matevska) who has chosen not to speak since they lost their parents when she was young. She lives with the two older sisters, one of whom works at the factory and suffers from drug addiction, and the other who is obsessed with gaining a visa to leave Veles as soon as possible.

Their relationship is intense and tenderly erotic, full of love but first and foremost at the service of survival. Their bodies are fiercely controlled by boundaries: boundaries of their citizenship, boundaries of marriage and connections to men, boundaries of drugs and substance addiction. They push against these boundaries, struggling to transcend, but ultimately they have little to help them. They are middle-aged, single women, without a father or patriarchal lineage to sustain them. There is little hope to escape this city, whose factory is slowly suffocating the city’s inhabitants with menacing fumes.

This film is beautifully wrought from all directions. The direction is very fine, walking along the razor’s edge to elicit both deep visual pleasure and emotional turbulence. The soundtrack is stunning; at certain points, the music is allowed to soar and take charge of the film in a powerful way (original compositions by Olivier Samouillan). The acting is both controlled and absolutely joyful, the actors breathing fully in the space they inhabit, embracing the contradictions of their characters: especially Latina’s performance of Afrodita, which is simply unforgettable.

The painterly quality of the film undoubtedly comes from Vuk’s art direction, as well as Teona’s training as a painter. There are, throughout the film, fantasy sequences with color so stunning and forms so ghastly, that they will not be easily forgotten. Careful framing and composition is a constant: the collective eye of the creators is tremendously successful at creating not only a political, challenging film, but also a remarkably beautiful visual feast.

The film is not easy to watch. The assertion of bodies is sometimes gruesome: the painful sexual encounters, the splitting episodes of drug withdrawal, the suggestion of rotting odor and burning flesh, the omnipresent suggestion of the oppressive fumes from the factory. However, the tenderness of the sisters in certain moments undoubtedly triumphs. The beauty and love that somehow prevail despite their chaotic context allows the film to float out beyond its difficulty. This film absolutely hovers in the mind at the same time that it is physically daunting to experience. There is a balance between pain and love that is completely real and completely felt. Beautiful.

Written by: Beth Fagan, December 11th 2010

The Things We Carry

admin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Directed by Ian McCrudden

Lono Entertainment

The Things We Carry tells the story of two sisters coping with the death of their drug-addicted mother Sunny (Alexis Rhee). After leaving her mother and sister Eve (Catherine Kresge) to travel the globe, Emmie (Alyssa Lobit) returns home upon news of her mother’s death. The sisters are forced to confront both Sunny’s drug-addicted friends and each other while searching for a mysterious package.

The film is loosely based on the real-life experiences of sisters Athena and Alyssa Lobit; Athena produced the film, while Alyssa wrote the script and stars as Emmie. As Eve and Emmie, Kresge and Lobit execute their roles with a muted intensity that speaks to the internal struggles of their characters. Lobit’s nuanced turn as the rebellious Emmie presents a woman whose antagonistic exterior hides a sensitive interior. The rest of the cast's performances are largely forgettable, as the other characters are merely meant to serve as catalysts to Emmie and Eve’s introspection and confrontation.

The Things We Carry alternates between scenes from Emmie’s memory and the sisters' present-day reunion, illustrating how they reached the point of estrangement. These vignettes are artfully articulated, as visual cues from the present (such as an image of a jacket or a yellow cab) serve as links to Emmie’s past. Flashback sequences on film tend to come off as confusing or campy, so it’s a testament to Ian McCrudden’s direction and Alyssa Lobit’s writing that the flashbacks are so effective at enhancing the storytelling and building narrative tension.

The film is saturated in yellows and browns, and features unnaturally bright lighting that emphasizes Emmie's discomfort in returning to her hometown. These blown-out images are placed in counterpoint to the beautiful violin and bass compositions of Timo Chen, whose score ebbs and flows, entering moments of reflection and heightened emotion and serving as an aural bridge between remembered past and lived present.

What is perhaps most impressive about the film is its complete lack of didacticism. Emmie may feel morally superior to her mother, but the film does not necessarily agree. The Things We Carry does not make moral judgments about any of the characters' actions; though the film centers on the detrimental effects of Sunny’s drug use, she is not presented as merely a drug addict—she is also a mother, a wife, and a friend. Ultimately the film is not without its flaws, but The Things We Carry survives on its earnestness and engrossing narrative structure.

Written by: Joanna Chlebus, August 19th 2010

The Opposite of Me

admin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Sarah Pekkanen

Washington Square Press

Lindsey Rose’s life is perfectly in order when The Opposite of Me opens: She’s hours away from being made a vice-president at a large advertising firm, she weeks away from owning a piece real estate in a tony New York neighborhood, she’s got a closet full of designer clothes, and, oh, she’s only twenty-nine years old. Sarah Pekkanen’s debut novel may sound like a familiar chick lit story, but over the course of nearly 400 pages, it wades into deeper waters.

At the book's beginning, the heroine is comfortable with being the successful, smart, and serious twin to Alex's breathtaking beauty, charm, and popularity. The two have orbited around each other since birth, but were never able to connect until an unexpected and catastrophic chain of events bring Lindsey back home to the DC suburb of Bethesda. Here, with her two hilarious and long-bickering parents, sister, and a childhood friend who’s always had a not-so-secret crush on her, Lindsey begins to discover and embrace her true self. Though The Opposite of Me is billed as being about sisters (and it is, in a way), the central theme seems to be identity, which even the four markers that divide the book suggest: “Success,” “Home,” “Jump,” and “Trading Places.”

Lindsey’s characterization of her twin was disturbing to me at first because the smart = ugly and pretty = dumb stereotypes for women are, generally, false. Because readers meet Alex first through Lindsey’s jealous eyes, I found the prettier twin to be unreal. Yet, I identified with the sisters. As the story unfolds and Alex is allowed to speak and feel and express herself on her own terms, readers see that there’s a lot more to her than meets Lindsey’s eye, including a devastating diagnosis that throws the entire trajectory of the novel a-plop.

As grown women, some of us would like to believe we were born with our personalities, that all of our little quirks were predestined by nature. But anyone with a sibling—particularly one of the same sex—knows that, as much as our DNA plays a part, our identities can also be formed by a desire to compete with or be different from our familial relations. In this regard, Lindsey’s extreme Type A personality juxtaposed against Alex’s seemingly carefree and lovable nature seems a lot more believable and relevant, as if years of rubbing against each other had molded polar opposite personalities.

The meat of this story involves many of the issues that engross twenty-somethings: career, family, and relationships. Both women are initially presented as perfect fodder for bragging parents, but as each begins to discover hidden talents, the sisters commit to the rough-and-tumble work of living lives of passion. Pekkanen successfully leaves many of the genre’s cliches in the trash, but that didn’t stop the writer from indulging in a few tried-and-true chick lit plot points, including The Makeover. After sexifying her image and going on a six page shopping spree, our heroine makes one last stop for new shoes.

"Your boyfriend’s going to love them," a salesperson tells Lindsey.

"Boyfriend?" I said, winking. "Don’t you mean boyfriends?"

"You go girl!" she said.

What’s not to love about that?

Written by: Whitney Teal, April 13th 2010

Love You to Death

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:03:00 +0000

By Shannon K. Butcher

Forever

Love You to Death raises many moral questions: How far would you go to have a loved one returned to you? Would you fly halfway around the world on a moments’ notice because you had a hunch something was wrong? Would you put your own life in danger to save a loved one?

Catching a last minute flight from Hong Kong to Illinois cost Elise McBride a fortune, but she would pay that numerous times over to make sure her sister came home safely. Ashley had only been missing a few days when Elise flew into town, a move thought as extreme by neighbors and local police. Ashley was a flighty twenty-one-year-old who they did not believe was missing until Elise persisted in the matter.

Doing everything she possibly can to track down Ashley under the unsolicited supervision of ex-cop Trent Brady, Elise finds a disturbing image on Ashley’s computer. Unbeknownst to Ashley, as she was snapping pictures of the animals outside, she caught the picture of a man hiding behind a tree in her yard. Ashley had become the object of desire by one very deranged maniac, Gary Maitland. As the days drag on and the body count rises, the search for Ashley becomes more frantic. Willing to do anything, including putting her own life in danger as bait, Elise wants her sister returned safely.

Maitland had lost his wife in a car accident many years before. Unable to let go of his perfect wife, he kept her body refrigerated in his basement, giving him access to her anytime her wanted. His need to keep his wife near sent him on a killing spree leaving many devastated families in his wake. Using body parts from the women that he kidnapped and murdered, Maitland was creating a new body for his beloved wife, whose was crushed in the accident. In his eyes, no other woman would ever measure up to Wendy.

Love You to Death brings together romance and murder in an expected way. Girl meets ruggedly hot neighbor, girl sleeps with ruggedly hot neighbor, well, you know how that goes. The plot itself seemed to lack the intrigue that made you want to know what happened next. The last seven chapters made the book. Love You to Death was a good casual read, but not something that gripped my undivided attention from start to finish.

Written by: Ryanick Paige, January 14th 2010

Sisters in War: A Story of Love, Family, and Survival in the New Iraq

admin — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:01:00 +0000

By Christina Asquith

Random House

Sisters in War is a brilliant, convincing, and powerful story of three women from the same Iraqi Shia family: Zia is twenty-two years old, university educated, an outspoken and brave young woman when the story begins with the invasion of Iraq in 2001. Her younger sister, Nunu, a university student, is a quiet and traditional Muslim woman who hopes for an arranged marriage with a suitable man. Their Mamina, a schoolteacher, reminisces about the proud Iraqi tradition of equality for women in the 1950’s and 1960’s. She recalls the times of General Kassim who believed in equality, freedom and creativity for all: women, men and children alike. Since 1979, Mamina and her Ph.D. educated husband, Baba, have lived in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s control.

The story of this Iraqi family is interwoven with the historical account of the events in Iraq during the American invasion as experienced by Heather and Manal. Heather was an idealistic and ambitious employee of the White House, whose office had already overseen $350 billion dollars in federal spending on national security programs when she understood that she could not overcome anti-American sentiment in Iraq from behind her desk in Washington, D.C. Manal was an educated, veiled woman in her twenties, an outspoken American aid worker who laced her powerful speeches in the United States with Muslim slang.

Both women traveled to Iraq where against all odds they became strong advocates for Iraqi women’s rights. They risked their own lives trying to help Iraqi women survive in their own country. They also founded the first women’s center in Baghdad.

These stories serve as a basic thread of Iraqi women’s lives, their hopes and dreams, and amongst them is Zia’s romance with Keith, an American contractor working in Baghdad. Zia supported her entire family working in the U.S. Headquarters as a translator from Arabic into English.

Zia and Nunu become the target of violent Iraqi militants. In a destroyed country, whose people experience the lack of every imaginable commodity, the dream of their liberation loses its significance. People are afraid to go out, women prone to abuse by any passing man yet unable to escape the restrictions of Iraqi society, are unable to continue their normal lives. Experiencing violence and harassment many of them fall into deep depression, giving up all their hopes and optimism for the future.

In spite of all the hardship, fear and death threats, the story has a happy ending. Zia manages to leave Iraq for Washington, D.C. in 2005, but her sister and Mamina have to stay in the horrifying, bloody city where suicide bombers kill hundreds of innocent civilians in every day attacks. Luckily, all three women are reunited at Sacramento International Airport in the summer of 2008 and Baba might be able to join them in the future. Zia’s love story is crowned by her marriage to Keith. Mamina, Zia, and Nunu are finally together and will share their lives together, hopefully in peace.

Christina Asquith, a journalist who spent two years in Baghdad working for The New York Times shortly after the start of the Iraq war, has written a sincere, thought-provoking, and timely account of the lives of Iraqi women from 2001 to 2009. This true story is engaging and very well written; in fact, I felt I was reading a novel rather than the non-fiction intimate description of the true events in Iraq. It is not only a story of women fighting for their liberated lifestyle. It is a story of Islamic traditions, religion, power, and politics versus American lifestyle, American power, and American beliefs.

In a subtle manner it recognizes the failure to understand, to want to understand the Muslim world by Americans and vice versa. Indeed, in her extraordinary book, Asquith filled in many pieces of the Iraq puzzle that needed to be deciphered.

Written by: Anna Hamling, January 9th 2010

The Sand Castle

admin — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Rita Mae Brown

Grove Press

Sometimes, you can judge a book by it’s cover. In this case, the front cover of the book in question depicts two women in bathing caps and red lipstick and resembles a scene from an Esther Williams movie. The opening paragraphs of Rita Mae Brown’s The Sand Castle establish a short story encompassing a memorable day at the beach, as recalled through the eyes of seven-year-old Nickel Smith, a child with a sharp eye and ear attuned to the events and conversations taking place in the adult world surrounding her.

Nickel, her cousin Leroy, her Aunt Louise and her mother have made a day trip to the beach to lift their spirits after the recent loss of Leroy’s mother (and Louise’s daughter), Ginny. Nickel is attentively listening to her mother and Aunt’s conversation as they navigate their way to the beach in the “new black Nash with the dull gray interior.”

In the tale, Brown relies heavily on period specific dialogue and detail to establish the setting and characters in her story. The Hunsenmeirs are glamorous, independent, bickering but loving Chesterfield-smoking sisters. Julia, Nickel’s mother, is the sassy younger sister, provocatively cursing, mocking and otherwise provoking Louise. Louise, the dour older sibling, has sought solace in religion since her daughter’s death, taking all opportunities to quote scripture to her family.

Throughout the story, the author relies on telling over showing, employing long passages of overdrawn script-like dialogue between the sisters to fill out the narrative. Observations about the main characters and the larger family dynamics are relayed to the reader from Nickel’s point of view, which is far too astute and complete for a young child, even a precocious one. Passages such as “Mother, sidestepping the bait for a fight dangled by her older sister-just how much older also a ripe subject for contention,” render the tale more trite than heartwarming.

Allow me to conclude by employing another well worn phrase or cliché: Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Brown’s account of a family affected by grief made me ask “So what?” at the story’s end. I do not believe angst is more worthy of literary attention than happiness or humour. While the light tone itself makes this work distinctive, due to the pedestrian pace of the story, lack of revelation, or change in any of the characters, the work is only the sum of its parts. This brief read merits borrowing from the library for reading on your own beach holiday.

Written by: Ruth Cameron, December 19th 2009

Invisible Sisters

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 22:50:00 +0000

By Jessica Handler

Public Affairs

The loss of a loved one can wreak havoc on the closest of families. There doesn’t seem to be a formula that can predict which families will survive a tragedy and which families will break apart as a result. In her painfully honest and touching memoir, _Invisible Sisters, _Jessica Handler revisits the heartbreaking losses of not one, but two of her sisters: Susie (from leukemia at age eight) and Sarah (from a rare blood disorder in early adulthood).

Survivors’ guilt is a term that describes the feeling that arises when one pulls through an unimaginable situation while others do not. Whether it be victims of genocide, natural or man-made disasters, or plane crashes, the survivors are left to ponder “why them and not me?” Handler writes about the burden she carried of being the “well sibling” in a family that slowly foundered under the weight of sorrow and tragedy.

She describes her father, a union lawyer and activist who found it easier to help those less fortunate, but was helpless when it came to rescuing his own family. Her mother’s focus was to keep moving forward and hold the family together at any cost: chairing the PTA, saving newspapers for fundraising drives, and chauffeuring Jessica to piano, clarinet, and ballet lessons all the while navigating an endless round of doctor’s appointments. After Susie is hospitalized (again), she writes about the death of her parents’ marriage in spare but moving terms: “That night while I slept, my parents began the slow and terrible turning away from one another that erodes families facing the death of a child. My father became heart. My mother became mind.”

By the end of Invisible Sisters Handler has journeyed back into the past to revisit the journals she kept as a teenager and has also gained access to the voluminous medical records that charted the course of her sisters’ illnesses. Her bravery in revisiting her family’s story and her decision to choose life over the memories and images of the past that continue to haunt her to this day is inspiring.

Written by: Gita Tewari, September 25th 2009

The Vanishing Point

admin — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 12:30:00 +0000

By Mary Sharratt

Mariner Books

The Vanishing Point is the story of two sisters living at the end of the 17th century. The title comes from the point on the horizon where an object disappears from view. In this case, the sisters, May and Hannah have been separated by distance and marriage. May, the eldest daughter is beautiful and willful. From the age of 15 she has taken many lovers, earning her the reputation as a slut. Hannah, raised like a son by her physician father, is educated in medicine, but little else. The sisters are “as different as night and day.” When May is forced to leave their English village to marry an unknown distant American cousin, her sister Hannah is bereft. There is little correspondence between the sisters. However, by earlier agreement, Hannah is to travel to America to reside with May and her new husband, when their father dies.

A tiny mystery ensues when Hannah arrives and discovers that her sister has died along with her newborn daughter. Her sister’s widower, Gabriel, will not tell Hannah how her death occurred. Locked together in grief, Hannah and Gabriel fall in love. They have a son, and live alone on a rundown tobacco plantation in the wilderness. Trouble ensues for the two when questions arise from the townspeople concerning May’s death. There is a rumor circulating that Gabriel is her murderer. Hannah is driven to discover the truth to the detriment of her family. Unfortunately, the promised mystery can be solved midway by any reader.

The novel is well researched. However, some portions are clumsy. While the conversations are written in colloquial English, the written correspondence between the sisters is written in old English. Instead of becoming an insight into 17th century life, the passages are confusing. While attempting to alleviate questions and conflicts within the storyline the author resorts to cliché. Each of the sisters dreams about the other, while the housekeeper, Joan (and later, Adele), reads tarot cards (or bones) to uncover missing information.

The novel takes many genres and dumps them into a single work. It seems to have trouble deciding if it should be a history, a mystery, or a gothic romance. Still, if you want to read a story about women living unusual lives outside of mainstream society you may enjoy The Vanishing Point.

Written by: Teresa Y. Raines, February 25th 2007