The Good Sister

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