Title:
The Other Sister
Author:
ST Underdahl
Publisher:
Flux
Rating:
WORTHY!
Susan Thompson Underdahl is a psychologist who has experienced the very story she relates in this novel, and relate she does. I don't know how much of it is fiction and how much is actual memory, but I do know this was a novel I read through from cover to cover in one sitting, and I enjoyed it immensely. Afterwards I found myself wondering how the Josey's real life counterpart felt when she learned that this novel was coming out.
The novel is about Audrey, an adoptee, contacting her birth mother and discovering she has a birth father married to that same mother and she has two brothers and a sister in that same family. I can;t imagine what kind of a shock or revelation that would be to a young woman. Underdahl was the 'Audrey' of this novel, but she told it from the 'Josey' perspective which is interesting, and is perhaps what I might have done if I'd been in her position. I think she was able to empathize with Josey so well because in some regards, Audrey and Josey were the same person while at the same time being quite different, having gone through very different experiences and having an outlook on life which differed in many ways.
Josette, sixteen, is the middle child, with an older brother Jake and a younger brother Julian (yeah, I know). She's a straight-A student who wants to become a psychologist. She has two best friends, Sarah and Britt, and comes home one day after studying with them to discover that her mother has some news about which she's very nervous about sharing with her daughter. Josey has never seen her mother quite like this. Why her father isn't present for this discussion I don't know. I found that slightly disturbing, but his absence at that particular time is actually a part of the story in a way; it's a harbinger of the relationship between Josey and her parents which bubbles up later in the novel.
Josey (I don't like that name, neither in its full version nor the diminutive) is hit rather harder than her brothers by this news. Why her mother chose to tell her before she told either of the sons, and especially given that one of the sons is older, is also dealt with later in the novel. I think in this case it was a wise decision, but later, the parental decisions were not so wise in these events!
Since the real story took place twenty years before, Underdahl chooses to address the lack of Internet and email by giving Audrey an aversion to tel phone contact and having the initial correspondence take place via snail mail, although the very first contact, not with Audrey but with a social worker, comes by phone. The purpose of the call to ask Anne (Josey's mother) if she's averse to her adopted daughter contacting her. Anne gives the go-ahead and soon receives an intelligently-written letter from Audrey tentatively opening the lines of communication. There's a photograph enclosed, of Audrey and her fiance. Audrey looks very much like Josey.
This is the first of a series of crises through which Josey goes. The next is when she learns that Audrey is a psychologist. Josey now feels that she has lost her position as only daughter, and as senior daughter, as well as being 'replaced' by someone who looks like her, has usurped her career goal, and is occupying almost all of her mother's attention. It's heartening to see how Josey, so young and so struggling, steps up to the situation. I doubt that I would have handled it so well at her age.
Yet despite her rather heroic struggle, she is struggling. Her parents arrange for a meeting in Cancun - neutral ground - so that they can all meet and get to know one another. Because Anne works for an airline, she's able to get discount fares and they occupy a small villa, and spend three all-too-short days together, but Josey notices that Audrey is crying at one point, and when they part at the end of the vacation, she says something mean to her new sister and, too late, regrets it.
In the end it's all resolved and the outcome works for everyone, but there is a journey before Josey can get there, and it's a journey with some surprising revelations about her calm and confident older sister. But this is something you will have to find out for yourself. Despite the misgivings I had after reading Susan Underdahl's bio (she knew a ghost for eight years? She can sometimes breathe underwater?) which made me doubt her veracity in other regards, this novel is all I'm reviewing here, not the author, and the novel is well-done, sensitively written, inventive, entertaining, and very enjoyable. I rate it worthy!
