SISTERS UNDER PRESSURE is always a good place from which to plot a story. After all, with all that history between any set of sisters (you didn’t really think you are the only one who has issues with your sister did you?), it’s a good bet that if you squeeze the pair a bit, some interesting things will happen. They do, in a new novel, and they do it quite well, indeed.

A Soft Place to Land, by Susan Rebecca White, pushes sisters Ruthie and Julia where no sisters may ever want to go, and does it beautifully. Opening with the sudden accidental death of the girls’ parents, the book spans 20 years, watching as the sisters heal, search, change, grow and complicate their own sisterhood in ways that are both realistic and stunning to watch. Swept up from the beginning, you’ll be swept all the way through the story.

Susan Rebecca White is the author of the previous critically acclaimed Bound South, and teaches creative writing at Emory University.

Just published as a trade paperback by Touchstone Press, this is a book to grab and read with the sisterhood, sisters. Enjoy.

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CREEPY SISTER FICTION is not that hard to come by. Sisters, after all, provide great territory for things to go seriously wrong. And watching them go there has that certain can’t-take-your-eyes-off-this quality. So it is with the masterful psychological thriller The Sister, by Poppy Adams. A debut novel written in the voice of older sister Ginny, whose ordered life gets wildly disrupted by the return of sister Vivien, the book is part ghost story, part love story, and every inch a neo-Gothic tale.

The Detroit News called it “deliciously creepy.” Oh yeah. The sisters come from a long line of lepidopterists—scientists who study moths and butterflies—which is what Ginny has quietly been doing in the sprawling family Victorian when Vivien comes home to stay. Ginny has been sticking pins in moths for decades. Doing so to her sister, it seems, is not such a huge leap.

Available in a lush trade paperback from Anchor Books, The Sister would be a fabulous gift either for a sister with a sense of humor, or perhaps one to whom you’d like to give a little jab.

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I KNOW I SAID it. And I meant it. There is no such thing as writers’ block. And no such thing as getting stuck. But then a few years ago, writing my third book, I was having total structure breakdown. The book, in a million little pieces, would not braid together, and since the book was about red hair, braiding was a real issue.

The book was due. The pieces lay around me. What to do? I took a class in fiction writing, a genre I do not write, and it shook me good and plenty, and I got my book done, and ever since I have loved and adored Margot Livesey, one of my teachers, though never so much so as now, having just finished “The House on Fortune Street.”

This is as good a book about the complexities of long friendship between two women as I’ve read. Gorgeously wrought, intricate and precise, it is told from four points of view, with only one of those written in first person. So difficult to do as a writer; so deeply satisfying for the reader–to look at this one friendship from all those angles.

Read, it, sisters. And visit Margot Livesey on her website to learn more about this brilliant sister writer and fine teacher.

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WHAT HAS GREATER IMPACT, the stories we tell ourselves, or the stories others tell us? When the subject is us, which do we believe more? Those are the questions posed, poked, provoked, and provided by the haunting new novel, The Story Sisters, by Alice Hoffman.

Daunting in its seeming inexhaustible supply of ways to present these questions, the book utilizes three sisters to illustrate the many manners in which we tell one another about ourselves. That the tellers of the tales are sisters provides that extra inescapable dynamic of narrative; maybe you could ignore the story you’re hearing were it a mere friend telling it. Make it a sister, and you’re hooked, yes?

Several times I actually put down this book and walked away, too squeamish was I for what was coming (hint: this is a bleak story in parts, and sad), but then would creep back up and sneak in to see what the Story sisters had done next.

From Alice Hoffman, who has a wildly unpredictable history as a writer of being either wonderful or careless, this one falls somewhere in between. Ultimately, I read it all, and will ponder for a good long time just how much more impact it has when the teller of your tale is your sister.

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