With Sister Creatures, Laura Venita Green invites her reader to navigate a shape-shifting world, beginning in rural Louisiana and ranging overseas and into starscapes and imagination. Rotating among a small group of girls and women, this imaginative narrative muddies the line between the novel's real world and a fictional one within it. The result is dreamy, often disturbing, and hauntingly unforgettable.
In the opening scene, Tess uses her isolated job as a live-in nanny to hide away from the life she feels has already cratered, at age 20, with her heavy drinking. A neighboring teenager, Gail, makes a disquieting appearance: she is clearly not well, perhaps in danger, but rejects Tess's half-hearted offer to help. The older girl "hat[es] how relieved she felt not to have to deal with anything." Gail's plight becomes a legend to the other characters until she makes a reappearance as an adult at the novel's end. Meanwhile, Tess grows up and has a daughter of her own, lives around the world as part of a military family, but struggles to escape the problems she hid from in Pinecreek, La. Her former best friend, Lainey, leaves Louisiana as well, resulting in permanent banishment at the hands of a troubled younger sister. Another young woman, Olivia, wrestles with the local options, characterized as "Jesus and booze," and with a sexuality not likely to be tolerated there. And then there is a recurring character whose entire reality seems in question. While they all choose to leave Pinecreek, the struggles that originate in their shared hometown follow these characters to Munich, Baltimore, New York City, and beyond.
In their parallel comings-of-age, and across generations, Green's characters thread their paths between love and spite, affection and abuse. Their loose connections and jumps in chronology reward close attention, contributing to a slightly off-balance reader experience that is very much a part of the novel's atmosphere. Sister Creatures blurs the concepts of reality and of right and wrong. Are the woods--of Louisiana, Maryland, or Bavaria--sanctuary or threat? Who is real and who is made up? Green's narrative offers a strong literary bent, as characters interact with "The Yellow Wallpaper," old fairy tales, misogyny, motherhood, and their own creative pursuits. They hurt each other, but they help each other, too; this is a novel ruled by nuance and surreality as well as the all-too-real.
Sister Creatures is often unsettling, but pairs moments of great sweetness alongside discomfiting ones. This novel remains thought-provoking long after its final pages. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia
Shelf Talker: From rural Louisiana to locations around the globe, the same problems and secrets follow a quartet of girls-become-women in this arresting, unnerving, and wise debut novel.