The Good Sister: A Novel - Softcover

Kain, Jamie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250047749 ISBN 13: 9781250047748

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2015

Synopsis

The Kinsey sisters live in an unconventional world. Their parents are former flower-children who still don't believe in rules. Their small, Northern California town is filled with free spirits and damaged souls seeking refuge from the real world. Without the anchor of authority, the three girls are adrift and have only each other to rely on.

Rachel is wild. Asha is lost. Sarah, the good sister, is the glue that holds them together. But the forces of a mysterious fate have taken Sarah's life in a sudden and puzzling accident, sending her already fractured family into a tailspin of grief and confusion. Asha has questions. Rachel has secrets. And Sarah, waking up in the afterlife, must piece together how she got there.

Jamie Kain brings us The Good Sister, a stunning debut young adult novel about love in all its joyful, painful, exhilarating manifestations, and about the ties that bind us together, in life and beyond.

About this title

About the Author:

JAMIE KAIN grew up in Louisville, Kentucky but has had a nomadic adulthood. After many moves, she is now happily and permanently settled in Northern California with her husband and two children. Wherever she goes, her devoted writing and jogging partner, a pit bull mix named Reno, can nearly always be found at her side. The Good Sister is Jamie's debut young adult novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

One

Sarah Jade Kinsey

 

It’s strange how someone you never knew and will never know can change the course of your life forever.

For me that someone’s name was Brandon.

But before I can explain about him, I have to explain about me.

And what is there to say about me?

The truth is vastly more complicated than it ever was before the night a guy named Brandon, whom I never knew and would never know, appeared in my life and disappeared again in a brief and violent instant.

Life, it turns on a complicated array of delicate gears we cannot see. A heart that beats can go still in the space of a moment. Breath can vanish before we’ve had a chance to say good-bye.

My name is Sarah Kinsey.

I am, or was, the oldest of three sisters.

To tell my story, I must wrestle with this question of verb tense, past or present, tedious and mundane as it is. I don’t know if I, the person, still exist in any way I can explain, so I stumble over mere words, desperate in death—as in life—to understand and to be understood.

Death is the twist of the knife that makes life so sweet, some say, though I am not sure I would agree.

Imagine a place where you neither sleep nor wake up. Imagine the life you would have lived, could have lived, playing before your eyes like a movie, only not.

Imagine none of this, or all of it.

The truth—if such a thing exists—eludes me.

Death has cut clean through my life, so that now I am no longer Sarah. I am the bloodred tulip tilting in the wind, I am the brown-black earth of a thousand years, I am the welcome rain on a parched day. I am a grain of sand, and I am the entire ocean. I am the beginning and the end of me.

Here is what you have to understand. Although I spent much of my life imagining what dying would be like in a far more concrete way than most people ever do, when it finally happened, it wasn’t for the reason anyone expected. It wasn’t at all how I imagined it would be.

It did not come from the slow decay of my body, not from cancer eating me away from the inside or wearing down my body’s ability to fight. It came from gravity, that simple force we all take for granted, the one that binds us to the earth and all we hold dear.

A moment before, my feet were planted on the earth, and a moment later, they were not. It was that simple.

No, that’s not exactly true. It is not so simple, not really. Love had a lot to do with it. Also grief, guilt, and no small amount of reckless, youthful foolishness.

And then there was Brandon, a horrible twist of fate I did not see coming.

But gravity, not cancer, brought me here, wherever here may be.

 

Copyright © 2014 by Jamie Kain

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1250047749
• ISBN 13: 9781250047748
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304