The Other Shepards

Teenage Holland and her younger sister Geneva, having always lived under the shadow of siblings who died before they were born, struggle to establish separate identities and escape from the oppressive weight of their parents' continuing grief.

Gr. 5^-8. The specter of the other Shepards hangs over the Greenwich Village townhouse of Holland Shepard and her younger sister, Geneva. The obsessive compulsive Geneva and Holland, who watches over her but borders on similar behavior, live with the knowledge that before they were born, three older siblings died in a car crash on an island in the Bahamas. It is this singular fact that seems to affect everything in their family's lives. Then Annie arrives. The girls find her in the kitchen starting a mural that their father has ordered for their mother's birthday. From the first, Annie's take on life, so different from the fear-based philosophy of the Shepards, beckons them, and before long the girls are doing things they never dreamed of. For Geneva, there is the experience of riding on the germ-riddled subway in order to see an art exhibit; for Holland, it is finding the courage to meet a new boy--and what a boy. Ultimately, the girls take a trip to the island where their siblings died in an effort to make sense of their lives. The hub around which all these spokes spin is Annie, and Griffin does a marvelous job of bringing readers to the slow realization that Annie is not the painter she seems but rather the spirit of the Shepards' older sister, come to shake up the moribund family. Equally successful is the way Griffin mingles the mystical with the commonplace. She paints Annie so carefully she seems as real as a kiss from a first boyfriend, and what can be more real than that? Carefully crafted both in plot and language, this book shows the heights that popular literature can scale. Ilene Cooper