Sister, Sister: 5 Novels About Sisters That Explore the Ties That Bind, Betray, and Break
By Melissa Anderson Sweazy
Fun had definitely been invented by 1983, so my little sister and I put our own spin on it by playing There’s a Monster, now Run! Rules were simple: I was the monster. She ran. I was nearly 4 years older, so Lindsey was a goner. She died by monster multiple times. The most epic death was when I cornered her in the living room and made some proclamation about how she was caught and there was nowhere to run and bless her, she was committed. She pretended to pass out – right into the corner of the living room glass-topped coffee table. There was blood, a trip to the minor med, and some serious if not begrudging respect for her commitment to the bit. Sisterhood. It’s all fun and games until someone ends up with stitches.
The sisters in my debut novel The Sisters of Crimson House are playing their own game of Monster, Now Run! And just like with my own sister, no one explained the rules. Charley Bryde hasn’t stopped running from monsters real and imagined. She grew up in a house filled with powerful psychics who failed to predict the tragedy that would shatter their entire existence. When the job of maintaining the family business – and crumbling family mansion – falls to Charley, the only one without any magical ability, she’s making up the rules as she goes. When her older sister Miranda, a powerful and world renowned medium, returns after an unforgivably long absence, their reunion brings about a major reckoning. It’s personal. It’s supernatural. They are their own storm fronts colliding to form one hell of an emotional bomb cyclone. But at the end of the day, they are bonded by blood, by a family legacy they can no longer outrun.
In writing about these complicated and calculating sisters, I was struck by how many of my favorite narratives feature a riveting sister dynamic at their core. Families are literally the ties that bind; the assumption that sisters will be each other’s champions can backfire spectacularly when the ghosts of jealousy, sibling rivalry, and familial expectation rise to haunt these sisters’ houses.
While I ponder whether Hurricane Charley or Hurricane Miranda would be more destructive, here are five complex yet celebrated sister pairings from five unforgettable books.
You already knew the Owens sisters are cursed. Alice Hoffman’s prequel to Practical Magic finds Sally and Gillian’s story informed by their indelible aunts Franny and Jet (and Uncle Vincent), siblings who would activate that curse long set in motion in 1620 by a defiant Maria Owens. Their mother Susannah is understandably hardcore about enforcing the rules to keep her children safe. But a summer visit to Aunt Isabelle’s changes everything: no rules, therefore no protection, but a chance to love, consequences be damned. Eldest daughter Franny embraces the eldest daughter gold standard: manage everyone’s feelings while ratcheting down her own. Middle sibling Jet abandons herself to love, curse be damned, and is shattered in the process. They are bonded together by blood but even more so in grief, a dynamic that will ricochet throughout their bloodline – and Hoffman’s books.
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Korede is practical, efficient, calm under pressure. Excellent skills for her job as a nurse; invaluable tools to exploit if you’re her stunningly beautiful and murderous sister Ayoola. Korede knows how to dispose of a body and clean a crime scene, and she’s gaining experience as her sister continues to dispatch her boyfriends with increasingly shoddy cover stories. But once Ayoola catches the eye of Korede’s long, unrequited crush, Korede must decide which is more powerful: her attraction to the doctor, or her power by proxy as the one woman clean up crew to Ayoola. Theirs is a fascinating sibling dynamic, ultimately one that calls into question the very nature of identity. Can Korede thrive let alone imagine a future where she is the one calling the shots?
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It’s a mild spoiler to say that Cora’s half-sister Deiliah is dead. But she is by no means absent. Chinese-American Cora Zeng is a reluctant crime scene cleaner after the racially motivated murder of her glamorous sister at the height of the Covid pandemic. She is also visited by the spirits of “hungry ghosts,” apparitions that Cora suspects might be her sister in addition to other murdered Chinese in her adopted home of New York City. Delilah may or may not be haunting her sister from beyond the grave, but her sister is never far from her thoughts. Her grief and guilt ultimately transform a timid, passive Cora into the passionate justice-seeker her older sister never got to experience.
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We have multiple timelines if not multiple genres and stories within a story within a story, but the broken hearts at its center are sisters Iris and Laura. Only one of them is able to tell the story – or multiple stories – of their legacy as granddaughters of a wealthy factory owner whose riches quickly lead to ruin in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Laura is dead from a car crash. But her death ripples outward, recounted in a series of news articles, a memoir in progress, and a metaphor tucked inside a novel about an eponymous blind assassin and his lover. History is written by the survivors, but Iris’s multi-layered version of events attempt to give voice to a lost sister whose story didn’t end when her car plummeted into a ravine. The interlocking stories literally leave planet Earth for another universe, but Iris’s grief and guilt stay firmly entrenched in her psyche.
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Once upon a time Milly had the sight, able to interpret the future spelled out in the bottom of a tea cup. But now Milly is barely getting by with a mediocre waitressing job in a forgettable small town, trying her damndest to forget that other small town where she buried plenty of secrets. When her long lost sister Frances shows up for help, Milly no longer has her literal bag of tricks to draw from. But her sister’s life depends on her willingness to head right back into the last place she’d ever thought to return. The trauma that has bonded these women since childhood is rooted as deep as the gnarled willow tree that haunts their nightmares. Is it enough to spark Milly’s abilities back to life and give these sisters a fighting chance at a future?
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Hardcover
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Melissa Anderson Sweazy is a filmmaker and the host of the true ghost story podcast You Can See Me in the Dark. Her debut novel The Sisters of Crimson House arrives September 29 by Sourcebooks Landmark.
For fans of Starling House, Play Nice, and Practical Magic comes a biting, layered, and haunting debut following one woman from a long line of psychics and seers who will do anything to save her family legacy and the haunted house she grew up in.
Charley Bryde is nothing like the rest of her exceptional family. The only woman born in a long line of famous psychics, seers, and mediums to not inherit the family gift, Charley spends her days trapped inside Crimson House, the coveted family mansion in Memphis, Tennessee, living in the shadows of her talented older sister Miranda. But when a shocking tragedy leaves her parents dead and the other Brydes scattered across the globe, including her sister, Charley is left behind, forced to grow up on her own, and fast. As the money runs dry and the once illustrious Crimson House begins to crumble, Charley is left with no other option; turn the manor into a ghost tour and haunted house attraction and start conning her customers to make ends meet. She may not have any “real” powers, but she sure knows how to pretend.
So when a skeptic starts targeting Charley to try and debunk her new business endeavors, she’ll stop at nothing to save the family legacy. But the skeptics arrival cracks something open in Charley that the Brydes wanted to remain buried. Deep. And when Miranda shows up unannounced after six years, summoned by the house and what dormant thing is growing inside her sister, the two will come to realize that Crimson House, and their own family, hold secrets even the greatest psychics couldn’t foresee. Secrets that threaten to destroy them.
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