Sister - Hardcover

Ansay, A. Manette

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688144497 ISBN 13: 9780688144494

Publisher: William Morrow, 1996

Synopsis

In her remarkable second novel, 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, unable 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.

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.

About this title

About the Author

A. Manette Ansay is the author of eight books, including Vinegar Hill, Midnight Champagne (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Blue Water. She has received the Pushcart Prize, two Great Lakes Book Awards, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the University of Miami.

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.

Reviews

There is a beauty and clarity and much sorrow in A. Manette Ansay's second novel, Sister (William Morrow). The sister of the title is Abigail (Abby) Schiller, and through her achingly observant eyes we are brought to the troubled heart of her Catholic rural Wisconsin family. Moving back and forth in time between Abby's girlhood in the 1970s and '80s and her early years of marriage and motherhood in the '90s, Ansay writes with the grace and assurance that marked her fine first novel, Vinegar Hill, and her story collection, Read This and Tell Me What It Says. On just about every page of this deeply satisfying story you will find a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph that makes you feel the wonder and the terror of these scarred, ineluctably entwined lives.

When Abby and her one-year-younger brother, Sam, were growing up in Wisconsin, she'd quiz him before they fell asleep: "Me and Mom are drowning and you're in a boat, but there's only room for one more person. Who will you save?" Not until he answers "You" can Abby fall asleep, secure that Sam "loved me best."

When this novel opens, Abby is 30 and hasn't seen Sam in more than a decade. By the age of 17, he'd become a sullen delinquent [and] hasn't been heard from since. Now, still trying to understand why her brother couldn't save even himself, Abby reflects back on an uneasy childhood: their father, an angry man who hated "sissies" and tried to taunt his son out of being one; their mother, loving yet often ineffectual. The puzzle of Sam's disappearance does get resolved in the final pages--but more important than the suspense is the way Ansay avoids the self-consciousness and cliches of many coming-of-age novels. Her story rings poignantly true.

Second-novelist Ansay (Vinegar Hill, 1994) again traces the scars of childhood emotional abuse--here, strikingly rendered, the crippling and even deadly effects of abuse on the lives of Abby and Sam Schiller, the children of a sadistic small-town midwestern car dealer, as they grow toward troubled adulthood in the 1970s and '80s. The characters are vivid, the reconstruction of events suspenseful and convincing. Abby, the narrator, now 30, married, settled in New York State, and pregnant with her first child, is haunted by the memory of her younger brother's baffling disappearance from their hometown of Horton, Wisconsin, one summer afternoon in 1984, 12 years before; he was never seen again. At an emotional turning point, Abby finds herself reliving Sam's slow deterioration from the sweet, imaginative, charming best buddy of her grade-school years to the defiant, self-destructive dropout who vanished on the heels of a series of town robberies. She traces his troubles primarily to her father's paranoid, unrelenting ridicule of Sam's ``sissified'' interests--and his jealousy of the boy's attachment to Abby. As familiar as these family dynamics are, the author superbly dramatizes scenes of the father's sarcastic nastiness and the kids' humiliation. The result is chilling and memorable--making the story's mild, unconvincing later developments all the more disappointing. After Sam's disappearance, Abby's father goes berserk and leaves the family; her mother becomes an increasingly devout Catholic; and Abby loses both her religious faith and her interest in a career as a musician. When, at the end, Sam's body is discovered buried in a field near the old family home, answers to all remaining mysteries (how did he die? when and why?) get swallowed up in a sentimental subplot concerning whether or not Abby will baptize the new baby. A gifted writer who needs to pace herself. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Intense and deeply affecting, Ansay's second novel (after Vinegar Hill and a short-story collection, Read This and Tell Me What it Says) is about loss?of human relationships, of religious faith and in the value of life?and about the mysterious process by which affirmation can again be achieved. It is also yet another story of a dysfunctional family, but Ansay explores this territory with restraint, creating a narrative that rings with emotional truth. From the perspective of marriage and prospective motherhood, narrator Abby Schiller reflects back on the years prior to her 17-year-old brother Sam's disappearance in 1984. As children, she and Sam are psychologically maimed by their bullying father, who brutally taunts them and insists that they conform to strictly differentiated gender roles. The manager of a Ford agency in a small rural township in Wisconsin, Gordon Schiller ridicules Sam's artistic interests, calling him a sissy; drives Abby to a nervous breakdown with his carping about purity and a woman's place in the home; and alienates their mother, Therese, who defiantly takes a job to achieve some independence. Sam, his gentle nature eventually corrupted by fear and anger, seeks salvation among druggies and punks who introduce him to violence. Abby is pulled back from the brink of despair by her devoutly Catholic grandmother. Later, however, when Abby breaks away from the Church, she incurs her grandmother's fury. With quiet assurance, Ansay conveys the atmosphere of a warm, tightly knit community permeated by Catholic observance, where belief in traditional marriage and a husband's preeminence gives some women security and others a lifelong sentence of servitude. Abby's difficult road to understanding, acceptance and a state of grace is related with beautiful control, and this heartbreaking novel resonates with wisdom about life's hard truths.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The sibling bond that stretches beyond life itself is the focus of this beautiful and poignant new novel by the author of Vinegar Hill (LJ 8/94). In the first person, Abby reflects on her childhood and her long-lost brother, Sam, while awaiting the birth of her first child. Though her rural Wisconsin upbringing seemed to be fairly typical, as Abby becomes more honest with herself, we see the father's strictness as the abuse it truly was and the mother's faith as neglect. As Abby reflects on how she was able to survive her childhood when Sam was not, many readers will similarly revisit their own pasts. This well-written novel should have broad appeal.?Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll. Lib.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0688144497
• ISBN 13: 9780688144494
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 228