Gloria T. (gloworm29) reviewed on 9/10/2005 + 81 more book reviews

In her remarkable second novel, Sister, A. Manette Ansay tells the story of Abigail Schiller, a girl who lives a seemingly normal childhood in a small Catholic community in Wisconsin. But that life is shattered when her younger brother Sam, uable to live up to his father's rigid ideas of masculinity, mysteriously vanishes at the age of seventeen. Haunted by both Sam's disappearance and memories of violence that her mother denies, Abby finds herself increasingly unable to reconcile her own life with the wishes of her family and the Catholic Church. At twenty, she abandons a promising music career and flees to upstate New York with the man she eventually marries, hoping to leave the past behind and create a new life.

Now thirty years old and expecting her first child, Abby realizes the past she tried to run from holds the key to her own future and to that of her child. She embarks on an emotional journey that retraces her brother's descent into feelings of worthlessness and a world of drug abuse, a journey that contradicts everything she once believed about her family and herself.

Sister is the poignant story of a woman's search for memory and meaning, the reconciliation of present and past within the complicated fabric of family. With grace and compassion, A. Manette Ansay spins hard-won triumph out of tragedy, testifying to the indelibility of the human spirit.

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