My Sister's Continent

January 1, 2006
Soon to be married, Kirby dreads the return to Chicago of her twin, Kendra, a ballerina. So severe is Kirby's stress-induced intestinal malady, her father sends her to his shrink. Kendra is even more of a wreck: a back injury has ended her dancing life, leaving this anorexic, pill-popping sexual outlaw perilously at loose ends. But their father trumps all: he has AIDS. Under all this duress, Kirby begins to question her engagement and her sexuality, and Kendra, a devotee of pain, takes up with a colleague of her father's who is proficient in sadomasochism. The adventurous editor of the literary magazine " Other Voices," Frangello has parlayed Freud's vision of female sexuality as a "dark continent" into a boldly explicit debut novel in which high-strung characters struggle to decode the mysteries of the self while their bodies express what their minds repress. Fran-gello is uncanny and mesmerizing in this smart, suspenseful psychosexual drama as she choreographs traumatic, possibly criminal, family dynamics, and delves fearlessly into questions of identity, abuse, power, trust, trespass, and delusion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)