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My Brilliant Sister (Amy Brown, Scribner)

My Brilliant Sister is a layered and involving story about womanhood, motherhood and art. It follows three very different women who all want to create art and are at a crossroads in their lives. The first section belongs to Ida, a young mother stretched to her limits. After moving away from her family, she is teaching high school during Covid lockdowns and raising a young daughter while struggling to find herself. The second section is a reimagining of Stella Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career from the perspective of Franklin’s sister, Linda. Linda is the opposite of Stella in many ways: quiet, contained, dutiful—but also clever and creative. The third section tells the story of another Stella, a musician who has achieved mainstream success, only to be grounded by the pandemic. She rents a beach shack just outside the town she grew up in and considers the other paths she might have taken. Amy Brown skilfully renders these narrators to be distinct, but (as is often the risk in a multi-voiced story) some are more compelling than others. Each character is making her choice and justifying it—to herself, her family and the reader. The interrelations tell the familiar story of women forced by society to choose between motherhood and career, questioning the cost of each. It should appeal to readers who enjoyed Genevieve Novak’s No Hard Feelings.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Fay Helfenbaum is a freelance writer and editor and was a bookseller for five years. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

 

Category: Friday Unlocked reviews Reviews