A very small town in Wisconsin, Catholic, is where this sad, disturbing story takes place. Told in retrospect by the sister, Abigail Schiller about her family and what led up to the disappearance of her only brother, Sam at seventeen. The two of them, somewhat isolated on a farm were very close as young children, but as they grew, and the mother chose to work part time, the balance of the family was disturbed. The father, Gordon, uses physical abuse and shaming to make a man of his only son under the guise of "bonding," while scaring his young adolesent daugher with stories of rape and murder and making her feel uncomfortable with her blossoming body.
As Abagail is sent to her grandmothers to recover from the resulting depression, her brothers life spins out of control. When he just doesn't come home one day in 1984, the family is shattered. With beauty and sadness, grace and honesty, Abigail at age 30 retraces the events that led to the disappearance in an emotional journey. What was her brothers fate? I am a new fan of Ansay. I now have several of her other books on my wish list. Her prose alone is worth the read!
by the author of Oprah Club selection VINEGAR HILL. A woman's search for memory and meaning.
In her remarkable second novel, Sister, A. Manette Ansay tells the story of Abigail Schiller, a girl who lives a seemingly normal childhood in a small Catholic community in Wisconsin. But that life is shattered when her younger brother Sam, uable to live up to his father's rigid ideas of masculinity, mysteriously vanishes at the age of seventeen. Haunted by both Sam's disappearance and memories of violence that her mother denies, Abby finds herself increasingly unable to reconcile her own life with the wishes of her family and the Catholic Church. At twenty, she abandons a promising music career and flees to upstate New York with the man she eventually marries, hoping to leave the past behind and create a new life.
Now thirty years old and expecting her first child, Abby realizes the past she tried to run from holds the key to her own future and to that of her child. She embarks on an emotional journey that retraces her brother's descent into feelings of worthlessness and a world of drug abuse, a journey that contradicts everything she once believed about her family and herself.
Sister is the poignant story of a woman's search for memory and meaning, the reconciliation of present and past within the complicated fabric of family. With grace and compassion, A. Manette Ansay spins hard-won triumph out of tragedy, testifying to the indelibility of the human spirit.
