A Sister’s Story

A Sister's Story is the story of Adriana, the narrator's sister. It's odd, I didn't understand don't know her name until I wrote this.

The story starts with Adriana with a baby in her arms at her sister's door, which surprised her because nobody heard about Adriana in a previous year. But, it's not only about Adriana. Also is about the narrator and her husband, Piero. Oddly, I keep using the narrator, name her N.!

The tale moves in time, past continue to present and their future. From when N. and Adriana were youth and live with their parent. They grew older, built their own life and friends, married, and again after a while of distance faced each other!

This was an easy read contemporary story set in France and Italy, about the sister's relationship, family, love, and betrayal.

Thanks to Europa Editions and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read A Sister’s Story by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated by Ann Goldstein, I have given my honest review.

A return here to the characters in A Girl Returned, the only other of this author’s books I’ve read. Since I admired that one so much, I had high hopes for this sequel, and wasn’t disappointed. It stands alone perfectly well, though I would still recommend reading the earlier work for a more complete picture of the family.

This book focuses on the relationship between the still unnamed narrator, conventional and compliant, and her wilder, reckless sister Adriana. Their core relationship of frustration mixed with fierce loyalty is layered with others - ageing parents/adult children, grown childhood friends, complicated marriages, for example - to create a rich setting for the events unfolding over a couple of decades, though it took me some time to get to grips with the varying timeframes within the narration.

‘Parents and brothers, the town in the hills, were far away, in the harshness of dialect. They occupied memories that were not happy, and barely encroached on the present. She, on the contrary, was always so alive and dangerous. I felt intensely the unease of being her sister.’

‘With my sister I shared a legacy of words not said, gestures omitted, care denied. And rare, unexpected kindnesses. We were daughters of no mother. We are still, as always, two girls who ran away from home.’

An intense, emotional story conveyed with subtlety and empathy. Recommended.

This is another book by Di Pietrantonio which centres on the complexities and ambiguities of familial relationships, especially (though not exclusively) the sibling bond between two sisters. The schematic of the 'wild' sister and the 'stable' one is utilised but is also nuanced here, with a context of volatile dynamics in love and the family.

The writing is sparse and readers who get easily confused about changing timeframes may find this challenging as we mostly experience the story though one sister's interiority where past and present are more porous and continuous. I like that there's a sense of the stress and anxiety that intimacy can create, as well as a closeness that is risky but also rewarding.

Firstly, I had not read Girl Returned or any other books by Donatella Di Pietrantonio so this was a novel of discovering a new author. This is a tightly told tale of the relationship between two sisters. It is told over a period of years and moves back and forth through the novel. It took me a while to warm to the slightly maverick sister,Adriana, but as the story unfolded I was intrigued to determine what caused the changes in the two sisters’ lives and ultimately where the plot would lead. The text is in some sense sparse but powerful and the dynamic that is established clearly identifies the frustrations between the siblings but also the love that permeates between them. A tale of contemporary lives and the pitfalls that lay before us .