A Reunion of Ghosts

Kirsten Potter captures the Alter sisters in this skillfully written, quick-witted novel. With her well-modulated tones and even pacing, Potter's portrayals of sisters Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter, with their tight family bond and inherited guilt, are distinctive and energetic. Listeners will empathize with the family's history of suicide as well as their humorous approach to life and its many coincidences. William Charlton delivers the final section, from the point of view of Danny Smoke, the Alter sisters' cousin. An eclectic mix of fictional characters and historical real-life people, such as Albert and Mileva Einstein, Frank Zappa, and Allen Ginsberg, are involved with the Alter family. With engaging narrators and an intriguing story, listeners will be spellbound to the very end. S.C.A. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Starred review from January 19, 2015
Mitchell’s triumphant second novel (The Last Day of the War) explores love, identity, and the burdens of history in coruscating, darkly comic prose. As the 20th century closes, Lady, Delph, and Vee Alter decide to kill themselves. The decision is not surprising; the middle-aged sisters embrace the chart of previous family suicides that hangs in their New York apartment as a source of “reassuring inevitability.” Departing from Alter tradition, however, they decide to leave a suicide note, intertwining their own narratives into their family’s complex history. At the heart of it is German Jew turned Lutheran Lenz Alter, who invented the chemical process that created the chlorine gas used in WWI and a predecessor to Zyklon B, used in Nazi death camps. His culpability seemed to poison the generations, as Lenz; his wife, Iris; their son, Richard; and Richard’s three daughters (one of whom is the mother of Lady, Delph, and Vee) all died by their own hands. Or so the sisters think, until a surprising visitation suggests that the family curse is not as defining as it seems. Moving nimbly through time and balancing her weightier themes with the sharply funny, fiercely unsentimental perspectives of her three protagonists—each distinct, yet also, as their name suggests, at “different stages of a single life”—Mitchell’s fictional suicide note is poignant and pulsing with life force. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME Entertainment.

October 15, 2014
In 1999, the three Alter sisters plan suicide. So have preceding family members, starting with their great-grandmother, the wife of a Jewish Nobel Prize-winning chemist who developed the first poison gas used in World War I and subsequently in Third Reich gas chambers. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2015

Meet the rather sad small sorority of Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter, sisters who have given themselves the "deadline" of late December 1999 to commit suicide. Their reasons are based mostly on that the Alters have miserable luck, stretching back to their great-grandfather, whose brilliant scientific legacy has clouded and haunted their lives. Lady, enamored with alcohol and television, has attempted suicide previously; Vee has suffered many losses owing to cancer, which has visited once again. Sheltered spinster Delph has lived a life of few dreams. And so the Alter curse must be broken, thus the siblings gather in their ancestral Upper West Side apartment. Mitchell (The Last Day of the War) presents the sisters sympathetically in this clever, modern tale that somehow also hearkens back to Albert Einstein, Walt Whitman, and a host of unusual, lively memorable characters. Following the novel's conclusion, the author's note reveals fascinating historical information. VERDICT While the dark theme may not appeal to some readers, this serious study of a very odd family has its darkly humorous side. [See Prepub Alert, 10/15/14.]--Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2014

In 1999, the three Alter sisters plan suicide. So have preceding family members, starting with their great-grandmother, the wife of a Jewish Nobel Prize-winning chemist who developed the first poison gas used in World War I and subsequently in Third Reich gas chambers. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 15, 2015
Three middle-aged sisters collaborating on a memoir that's meant to double as their collective suicide note may not sound like a hilarious premise for a novel, but Mitchell's masterful family saga is as funny as it is aching. Together, Lady, Vee and Delph Alter have decided that New Year's Eve, 1999-the cusp of the new millennium-will be the day they end their lives, quietly and with as little melodrama as possible. But first, they have embarked upon writing this "whatever-it-is-this memoir, this family history, this quasi-confessional." It will record the saga of the last four generations of Alters (theirs included). Also, it will double as their joint suicide note. ("Q: How do three sisters write a single suicide note? A: The same way a porcupine makes love: carefully.") Suicide seems to run in the Alter family, and now it has reached the current generation: Vee, the middle sister-whose beloved husband was murdered getting lunch one day at Chock full o'Nuts-has cancer, with six months to a year left. If one sister goes, they're all going. And so begins their project, which traces the Alter family history, starting with their maternal great-grandmother, brilliant and stifled, and great-grandfather, the German-Jewish Nobel Prize-winning chemist who invented the gas that would ultimately be used in the Nazi death chambers. "He was the sinner who doomed us all," they write, the root of the ill-fated family tree. She died (a gun in the garden); he followed suit (morphine). With variations, the subsequent generations did the same. Moving seamlessly between the past and the present, from Germany to the Upper West Side, Mitchell's (The Last Day of the War, 2004) dark comedy captures the agony and ecstasy (but mostly agony) with deep empathy and profound wit. For the Alters, life has been a seemingly endless series of tragedies; for us, the tragedy is that this stunning novel inevitably comes to an end.

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