The fraught relationship between two half-sisters links the 14 stories of Amy Neswald's exceptional debut collection, I Know You Love Me, Too. Ingrid and Kate, eight years apart, share a father who died when Ingrid was 20 and Kate 12. "Relationships between half-sisters should be half as complicated," Ingrid muses. "But they're not." Ingrid was shuttled between her divorced parents, never quite welcome in her stepmother's home--except by clinging Kate. To Ingrid, Kate seemed more annoyance than sibling. Meanwhile, in the decades that follow, Kate will keep wishing that Ingrid "just once [would] say you loved me."
Awarded the 2021 New American Fiction Prize, Neswald displays prodigious excellence in crafting intimate moments that hold vast resonance as she reveals the sisters' complicated history. Ingrid becomes a celebrated artist at 48 in "Things I Never Told You," her life encapsulated in her paintings. Premature sex teaches Kate she's been abandoned to grow up alone in "Lucky." Ingrid's admission in "And She Did," that "she didn't know what love was and how to keep it," overshadows all future liaisons. An injured bird in "Sweet Jesus" becomes proof of unconditional love. Strangers enable unexpected self-awareness in "Triptych" and "The Butterfly Collector." A gunshot--and middle-age--inspires transformative perspectives in "Forty-Six." Whale-watching facilitates sororal bonding in "Friday Harbor" and the titular "I Know You Love Me, Too."
Enhanced with inventive observations--success "arrived too late and she doesn't know how to care for it"; "Ingrid channels her obese aunt, her succulent swirls of fat"; "she's run out of things to say. She blames this on contentment"--Neswald effortlessly alchemizes the prosaic into something extraordinary. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon