The Secret Sisters - Hardcover

Rodgers, Joni

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060831383 ISBN 13: 9780060831387

Publisher: HarperCol, 2006

Synopsis

Though she is now remarried, Pia has never really gotten over her first husband's death. Her new husband travels most of the time leaving her alone in their pristine home, surrounded by white walls, white furniture, white carpeting. White, white, white. She keeps in touch, by phone, with her sister Lily, who, through a tragic and innocent mistake, was responsible for the death of her niece in a car accident and is now serving time in jail. Pia also talks to her sister–in–law, Beth, the grieving mother of the dead girl. Surrounded by these tragedies, Pia views the world as a threat to her hard–earned, peaceful––if lonely––way of life. She leaves the house only once a week; to visit her doctor. One day, on her way there, she stumbles across a hidden antique store and ventures inside. Like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole, the store––and its exotic owner––open her up to a whole new existence, one of swirling colors and chaotic feelings, of longing, desire and a new lust for life.

About this title

About the Author:

Joni Rodgers is the author of the memoir Bald in the Land of Big Hair, and the novels Crazy for Trying and Sugar Land. She lives with her family near Houston, Texas.

From Publishers Weekly:

Rodgers's somber novel (following her memoir Bald in the Land of Big Hair), weaves a tapestry of three Houston women's lives, each touched by bereavement. Pia, a high-powered career woman and mother of grown twin sons, unravels after the unexpected death of her husband, Edgar, on the night of December 31, 2000. Though she remarries a few years later, she suffers debilitating agoraphobia and severs herself from human connection except for the occasional phone call to her incarcerated sister, Lily. Serving a seven-year sentence for the manslaughter of her five-year-old niece, Easter, in a drunk driving accident, Lily struggles to accept responsibility for the child's death. Rodgers crafts Lily's stark, stripped-down narrative from journal entries, transcriptions of her phone conversations and quotes from the books she reads in the prison library. Beth, Easter's grieving mother and a less fully realized character than her sisters-in-law Lily and Pia, renders her world in equally bleak terms—"good days" or "not good days," a conceit that tires quickly. Rodgers is at her best when she choreographs an intersection of the three narratives, as when Beth finds Pia bloodied in her bathtub from a suicide attempt. It is in these interstices that the story delivers and "the secret sisters" attempt to resurrect their lives.
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About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCol
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0060831383
• ISBN 13: 9780060831387
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368