Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld

Growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, Kate and her identical twin sister, Violet, are extremely close—sharing a room, weathering the eccentricities of their parents, and delighting in the music and movies of their 1980s childhood. But in junior high, Kate makes a fateful decision that drives the sisters apart and sets them on different paths toward adulthood. Years later, Vi is living on the fringes of society while Kate, a devoted wife and mother, is doing everything she can to fit into suburban life. After a chance occurrence in the middle of the night, the sisters find themselves drawn together once again, forced to face the secrets of the past and to reconcile the differences between them. As the sense of order Kate has worked so hard to create in her adult life begins to falter, it’s not clear to her whether Vi, the one person who knows her best, will save Kate—or be her undoing.