Sister - Softcover

A. Manette Ansay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749079525 ISBN 13: 9780749079529

Publisher: Allison & Busby, 2008

Synopsis

"When my brother disappeared in 1984, I began to see myself in the third person as if my life were a story being told to someone else."

Abigail Schiller lives a seemingly normal childhood in a rural Catholic commuinity in Wisconsin. But that life is shattered when her younger brother, Sam, vanishes at the age of seventeen, fleeing their father's rigid rules of masculinity and the violence their mother denies. Finally, thirty years old and expecting a child of her own, Abby is determined to retrace her lost sibling's dark descent--embarking upon an emotional journey that will test the strength of her spirit, and contradict everything, she once believed about her family and herself.

A stunning work of rare poignance and unsettling power, A. Manette Ansay's Sister marks the literary maturation of a truly exceptional voice in contemporary American fiction. Deftly spinning triumph out of tragedy, the award-winning author of Vinegar Hill offers us a fresh understanding, of family, memory, faith.Abigail Schiller lives in a seemingly normal childhood in a rural Catholic community in Wisconsin. But that life is shattered when her younger brother, Sam, vanishes at the age of seventeen, fleeing their father's rigid rules of masculinity and the violence their mother denies. Finally, thirty years old and expecting a child of her own, Abby is determined to retrace her lost sibling's dark descent--embarking upon an emotional journey that will test the strength of her spirit, and contradict everything she once believed her family and herself.

A stunning work of race poignance and unsettling power, A. Manette Ansay's Sister marks the literary maturation of a truly exceptional voice in contemporary American fiction. Deftly spinning triumph out of tragedy, the award-winning author of Vinegar Hill Offers us a fresh understanding of family, memory, and faith.

About this title

Review:

As Abigail Schiller prepares for the birth of her first child, she realizes her attempt to put down roots with husband Adam will never be secure until she resolves the heartache of her past. She had fled her family farm in Horton, Wisconsin, just after high school and had severed all ties with her pious Roman Catholic mother and bullying, distant father. But it was the disappearance of her brother that troubled her most. Sensitive and vulnerable as a boy, Abigail was his guardian angel. Later, he rebelled against his abusive father through run-ins with the law and eventually vanished. The torment of his absence finally drives Abigail to discover what happened, forcing her to return to the places and people she thought she left for good.

Review:

"Sister takes the breath away like a blow to the stomach because it stirs any dormant anxiety the reader may have about losing a beloved sibling--to alcohol or to harder drugs, to deep childhood hurts or to the aloofness of adulthood.... In Sister, Abigail Schiller's younger brother, Sam, has been missing for ten years, since the two were teenagers in Wisconsin. Narrated by Abby, the novel maps the emotional roads leading to and from his disappearance, letting Abby remember her brother both as best friend and threatening stranger.... While Abby's grief is raw even ten years later, Ansay never lapses into sentimentality. Because Abby dreads as well as aches for Sam, Sister is more than an elegy--it is a relentless and shattering remembrance." -- Time Out, July 3-10/96

"A soul aches here, and the future seems forlorn. But Sister rises above that with its frankness and acuity, and the rhythmic beauty of its prose." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Ansay's dramatic rendering of people and events -- a form that subverts our craving for explanation and that finds luminous precedent in the works of O'Connor or Shirley Jackson -- lends a powerful edginess to her prose.... There's a persistent eerie parallel in this novel between the microstructure of the family and that of society at large. Indeed, in portraying the Schiller family, Ansay exposes the ailing Middle American psyche itself, for which the unexamined mores surrounding the dysfunctional family serve as dark accomplice.... Sister carves out some new, interesting terrain in a genre one might dub Midwestern Gothic." -- The Boston Sunday Globe, 7/21/96

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. -- Publishers Weekly

About this edition

• Publisher: Allison & Busby
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0749079525
• ISBN 13: 9780749079529
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 266