The Good Sister

September 22, 2014
Asha and Rachel Kinsey are in mourning after their older sister, Sarah, died in a fall from a cliff into the ocean—an unexpected twist of fate, since Sarah had fought cancer for years. Both Asha and Rachel are broken and reeling, acting reckless with boys, and hurting each other and their parents. Then Asha begins to wonder if Sarah’s death was really an accident, even as Rachel works to hide the truth of what really happened. Meanwhile, Sarah watches her sisters from the afterlife, full of intense regret. Through the distinct voices of all three girls, Kain (who has written for adults as Jamie Sobrato) gives life to the complicated relationship between sisters. While having Sarah speak from beyond the grave gives this novel a touch of the supernatural, Kain keeps her story and everyone in it grounded in reality. The author offers profound reflections on life, death, and the bonds of family, and as the suspense surrounding Sarah’s death intensifies, readers will find it hard to put this novel down. Ages 14–up. Agent: Annelise Robey, Jane Rotrosen Agency.

September 1, 2014
Everyone expected that cancer would end Sarah's life, not a fall to the sea from a foggy cliffside path in Marin County. Rachel is mute at Sarah's memorial service; Asha shows up late and inebriated, with a new tattoo. Their longstanding sibling dysfunction has multiple causes: birth order, illness, parental choices. Cancer made Sarah the center of family life; a bone-marrow match for Sarah made Asha a player in the drama, more valuable than Rachel. Raised by long-estranged parents on a commune, the sisters now live with their absent, indifferent mother and rarely see their father. Asha and Rachel struggle through each day alone and replay old battles when together. Drowning in grief, Asha depends on her friend, Sin, while fantasizing about his older brother. Rachel's string of boyfriends hasn't softened her anger, but Krishna, who introduces her to meditation, just might. Limned in sharp detail, the unchangeable, almost unendurable past overwhelms the story's gentler elements. From the afterlife, Sarah offers ruefully elegiac comments on her former life and hints of secrets to come, but they have little urgency. An important plot thread is unaccountably abandoned at the climax, darkening the story and leaving characters without the optimistic energy and sense of agency typically found in literature for teens. A haunting, dark and at times harshly beautiful exploration of the scars left by hurt and loss. (Paranormal suspense. 14 & up)

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August 1, 2014

Gr 9 Up-Asha and Rachel are left to grapple with their "good" sister Sarah's mysterious death along the California coastline. Neglected by their overly lenient, flower-child mother, Asha struggles with the loss of her beloved sister and her own confusion over her relationship with her best friend, Sinclair. Rachel distracts herself with boys to avoid the guilt over sleeping with Sarah's boyfriend before she died, and details are slowly revealed that hint at a secret reason for Rachel's destructive behavior. Typical birth order tropes are fleshed out into believable characters that, along with an unraveling mystery, compel readers to turn the pages. Chapters alternate between the sisters' perspectives, and while Asha and Rachel have similar "bad" sister voices (cursing, eye-rolling, wry inner thoughts), their plots are different enough to avoid confusion between narrators. Sarah's chapters are shorter, but powerfully haunting, as she, having awoken in the afterlife, watches her sisters' tumultuous relationship grow more strained after her death. Fans of emotional powerhouses such as Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (Little, Brown, 2002) and Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why (Penguin, 2007) will enjoy the novel's insight into the complexities of sisterhood, adolescence, and the "good" and "bad" behavior therein.-Hannah Farmer, Austin Public Library, TX

Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2014
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* Sarah, duly noted as the good and oldest sister in the Kinsey family, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at age 10. Before that significant heartbreak, she lived in a Northern California commune with her dad, Ravi (now John); her mom, Lena; her middle sister, Rachel; and her youngest sister, Asha. After the dissolution of Ravi and Lena's marriage, Sarah and her mother and sisters move to town, where she begins to undergo treatment, Asha becomes a viable bone-marrow donor, and Racheldoomed to be the wild onegrows apart from them all. Told in first-person alternating chapters, the novel's three sisters, who simply never had a chance at normalcy, ache on the page with honesty, laying bare their place in the family and in their own orbits. Only Lena remains selfishly static while everything around her spins out of control. In her debut novel, Kain writes bravely and beautifully, respecting the reader's capacity to respond with openness and a raw understanding of the turns life may take and to hold judgment as nuanced characters discover the many facets of their own complex beings. Only in describing the afterlife does Kain create a soft and somewhat diffused landscape in contrast to the sharp edges of life as a Kinsey. So, waitback to the sisters: Who did we say was the good one?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)