Our Sometime Sister [Hardcover]

Norah Labiner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2000

"Brilliant . . . Extraordinary in its subject matter, its language, its humor, and its depth." --Customer comment, Amazon.com.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Labiner's debut novel centers on Pearl Christomo's alienation from the material-laden connubial bliss of her mother's new and second marriage. Thirteen years of a routine of listening to her mother's dreams of finding Mr. Right and annual visits to her emotionally distant father end with the mother's marriage to a successful writer of popular self-help books. Pearl cuts a deal with her stepfather that sends the adolescent into exile in a boarding school in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where she begins to write fiction. It's a natural pursuit for a young woman trying to understand why her mother hates her elusive father and why her control-obsessed stepfather must manipulate her mother into an artificial happiness. Pearl begins an exploration of her own sexuality and writes about relationships between men and women. Her favorite theme is that men perceive women as morally empty and in need of being filled with material things, sex, and children. Her characters--an aging alcoholic writer, a troubled couple, enigmatic friends--parallel Pearl's own life. Vanessa Bush

From Kirkus Reviews

A perhaps overly clever debut, rich in literary allusions, that just doesn't come to enough. Young writer Pearl Christomo, sent to a remote boarding school in Michigan, begins writing a novel that increasingly resembles her own lifewhich in turn resembles Hamlet's. She's a daughter, however, not a son; her mother has married a stepfather who wants her out of his way. Judith, Pearl's mother, leaves Anthony, her father, a history professor and intellectual, because she wants something richer, fuller in her life. But the quest never ends, not even when she marries Martin Hamlin, a wealthy, inspirational author of self-help books. Pearl, who was only a toddler when Judith abandoned her father, now feels betrayed as a teenager by her mother's desertion, but also angered by her seemingly insatiable, continuing need for even more to fill her life after marrying Martin. Lavishly furnishing the house that Pearl calls Elsinore, Judith next wants breast enlargement and another child. In Pearl's own novel, meanwhile, characters like future actress Theresa, aging writer Hugh Denmark, philandering lawyer Aaron, poet Winstonand wounded women like Theresa's alcoholic mother and Winston's suicidal co-worker Ruthbegin to take after the people she meets at her boarding school. There's feckless senior Charles, for instance, who introduces her to sex, as well as the reprobate visiting writer Hugo Tappan and Pearls hard-edged friend Walker. Their lives evoke observations on the differences between men and women, on the influence of chance, and on love. The two worldsreal and fictionalslowly glide into each other, and truth by the end proves as elusive as the ghost that haunts the school, bearing witness, like Hamlet's father, to some past tragedy. Pearl suggests that in storytelling, as in life, there's no going back and no way of changing what was done. A novel of promise, undone by ambition. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 442 pages
• Publisher: Coffee House Press; 1st edition (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566890721
• ISBN-13: 978-1566890724
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,057,267 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars woefully misunderstood and underappreciated, April 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Our Sometime Sister (Hardcover)

The young Norah Labiner has given us a novel about a first time novelist that has ironically damned itself with its own complexity. Her aspiring novelist, Pearl, makes all the mistakes an intelligent, hyperliterary, naive first novelist would make... but the mistakes are Labiner's intention. It is Pearl, not Labiner, who has created a "novel of promise, undone by ambition." Labiner, in turn, has created a book that just may be brilliant and is certainly extraordinary in its subject matter, its language, its humor, and its depth . It deserves much more than the casual reading most critics will give it.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't miss this one!, September 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Our Sometime Sister (Paperback)

The only review I've written after the number of ones I've read. This is one of the ones that you can't put down. Funny and moving and mindblowing. You don't want her pages to ever stop. Each character could be a book in and of itself. I highly highly reccomend this read!! Now I just have to wait for the next one . . .

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ambition, Margarine, July 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Our Sometime Sister (Hardcover)

OSS is certainly ambitious. Like a successful surgeon at a high-rise hospital, it operates on many levels: a novel wrapped in a novel, a first novel about a first novel, a novel where the "real characters" emulate the "fictional characters" who were based on the "real characters" in the first place. It's enough to make a reader wonder, "Who the hell is in charge here anyway?"

While the "meta" aspects of the novel are dense, interesting, sometimes befuddling, and ultimately successful in their attempt to question the nature of the fiction at hand, what makes OSS great is Labiner's active, spot-on, often funny prose (departure points include the dark humor of Nabakov, the word play of Joyce, Plath, Salinger, the incessant list-making of your obsessive-compulsive grandmother) and a cast of very accurate and memorable characters. My particular favorites are the brooding Winston Delacourt (a classic `80's darksider in the Joy Di! ! vision mold), and both Hugo Tappan (an aging alcoholic writer) and Hugh Denmark (Hugo's "Humbert Humbert" fictional counterpart). For a novel with a decidedly feminine perspective, the male characters are very strong.

Describe the book in a sentence? "A coming of age prep school novel about a precocious teenage girl which uses Hamlet as its main subtext". Sounds lame, right? (And I'm not talking about gold suits, friend). But OSS is no more "about" the aforementioned than Moby Dick is "about" a guy who's mad at a fish. Good books both absorb and transcend their subjects. Good writers use their subject merely as a means to an end, as framework in which to allow themselves to say what they are really trying to say. Labiner is already a very good writer who soon may be great. A novel of promise undone by ambition? How about a novel of ambition done up with Promise? Now that's a tasty muffin.