By Anastasia Smith
FROM TIME TO TIME I love posting on here about sister-themed books (um, no I’m not talking about Sweet Valley High) that I’ve come across and enjoyed, because it always starts a juicy dialogue about what everyone has been reading lately. My current recommendation?
Posts tagged as:
sister fiction
By Paige Smith Orloff
A FEW YEARS back, my family made its own venture into the wilderness, moving from the urban sprawl of Los Angeles to the expansive green hills of the Hudson Valley. It’s paradise, yet the climate can be wretched and unforgiving, the land hilly and full of stones. We marvel aloud at the tenacity and sheer strength of this area’s early settlers; we are awed by what they accomplished, and quite certain we, with our reliance on power tools, the internet, and central heating, would not have a prayer of replicating their achievements. Novelist and memoirist Gabrielle Burton shares her own amazement at the resilience of our forefathers and mothers in her lucid, provocative novel, Impatient With Desire. Here’s what I thought.
By Marion Roach Smith
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 by Susan Rebecca White called A Soft Place to Land, and they do it quite well, indeed. The scoop.
Five of the six Mitford sisters
IF YOU’VE SPENT much time here, you already know how we TSP sisters feel about the power of memoir, and Mary Gordon’s layered remembrance of her mother, published in 2007, is an outstanding example of the genre. Our Sister Paige recommends it in this review.
NOT ONLY DID MEG WAITE CLAYTON WRITE THE BOOK on sisterhood, she’s done it three times–two already published novels and the third just sent off to her editor. “The emotional turf I seem to go back to again and again is sisterhood in the friendship sense,” Meg, the author of the national bestseller The Wednesday Sisters, told TSP’s Sister Marion. Marion’s profile of Meg is here to enjoy.
By Marion Roach Smith
OUR FAVORITE NEW BOOK is the exquisite Monday Hearts for Madalene by San Francisco disc jockey Page Hodel. The images in the video above are from a series of handmade hearts created by Hodel in memory of her partner, Madalene Rodriguez, lost to ovarian cancer. Each Monday, Hodel, 53, makes and photographs a one-of-a-kind valentine crafted from everyday objects, and then emails them to friends and family as a reminder and celebration of their love for one another. The result? This book and website, as well as other products, a portion of the sale proceeds going to The Women’s Cancer Resource Center in Oakland, California. Now that’s all heart.
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LORRIE MOORE IS MESMERIZING, Marion says, after reading her recent book, A Gate at the Stairs. It has “put me in a sort of trance-like state…thinking about who we are and how we got there, post 9/11,” adds Marion, and “causing me to pump some real energy into how I really feel about racism, fear, and the suspicion of others based on how they look and what they say.” More on the book, on Marion’s blog.
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, and what if the teller is our sister? Those are the questions posed, poked, provoked, and provided by the haunting new novel, The Story Sisters, by Alice Hoffman. Sister Marion read it, and has a thing or two to say in response.
W E TSP SISTERS HAVE MANY THINGS IN COMMON, not the least of which: stacks of books everywhere. We just can’t help ourselves; when we’re not writing, we’re reading. Marion’s gotten into yet another Barbara Kingsolver novel this last week, The Poisonwood Bible, and Paige is taken with a tale of Salem witches, in The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. Click those links to read over their shoulders.
First time here? Here's the idea: TSP is a network of blogs about the many facets of the word sister, and the concept of sisterhood. A sisterhood of sister blogs, you could say. Whatever sister means to you, from identical twin to sister-in-law (or in-friendship or in-feminism), we’ll make room to listen in about it or express it on TSP. Like the slogan up top says, “Don’t you have something to say to your sister?” We've got galleries of art and literature by and about sisters, and a Sisterpedia of sisterly trivia...but now we're getting ahead of ourselves. The quick study: 
As the suffix of its name suggests, 
No surprise, really, that sisterhood, often life’s longest relationship and always one of its most important, has been the Muse for so much creative self-expression by women, and also by men. 
