I heard about the author from a post on a writers’ group and d/l a sample of My Sister, the Serial Killer. I was hooked from the outset and bought the book. Oyinkan Braithwaite (OB) has subverted and refashioned ‘crime’ and produced a near-perfect noir except for a couple of important things – and I will come to those later - but they should not stop you from getting a copy pronto, taking the phone off the hook (as people used to say) and refusing to speak to anyone unless the house is burning down. Yes, it is that good.
The voice of the book is Korede’s, elder sister to Ayoola, the former a hospital nurse, tall, angular and not pretty (as she tells us), the latter an exquisitely beautiful wild child, utterly devastating, self centred and lacking any right-wrong moral sense. There is a mother but the father is ten years dead, though he looms back into Korede’s present; he was a domestic tyrant of absolutely the worst kind.
I don’t do spoilers but it suffices that the title announces the novel for what it is, but how it unfolds shows the young author to be a very bright star in the sky. The chapters are many and short, some a single paragraph, a page, max four – we should call them ‘scenes’. Each is headed by a word, usually one word, which signals the intent of the scene.
The voice of the book is Korede’s, elder sister to Ayoola, the former a hospital nurse, tall, angular and not pretty (as she tells us), the latter an exquisitely beautiful wild child, utterly devastating, self centred and lacking any right-wrong moral sense. There is a mother but the father is ten years dead, though he looms back into Korede’s present; he was a domestic tyrant of absolutely the worst kind.
I don’t do spoilers but it suffices that the title announces the novel for what it is, but how it unfolds shows the young author to be a very bright star in the sky. The chapters are many and short, some a single paragraph, a page, max four – we should call them ‘scenes’. Each is headed by a word, usually one word, which signals the intent of the scene.