Customer Reviews

Sister Crazy

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've read the reviews of this book from readers across the country. Its clear that more than half of them did not understand this book and were made very uncomfortable by the writer's form and style.
This is a wonderful book that shows the intricacies and inevitabilities of family love and devotion, and the damage that both can create.
I know this "review" gives you no feeling for the plot of the book - I only wish people would read and enjoy this book, and not pay attention to the dilettantes who pretend to be experts on Ms. Richler's work.

With quietly stunning prose, delightful humor and fierce intelligence, Emma Richler paints a swirling, impressionistic portrait of a family and captures quite piercingly the psyche of one very perceptive girl.

This is a tricky book. The narrator of the book is picking through childhood memories as she tries to find peace in her adult life.

Most of the stories are hilarious, starting with the opening when she describes the Action Man figure she tormented as a child. It's hard for adult writers to effectively create a child's perspective and priorities but Richler's writing is convincing.

The sneaky/ brilliant part of Richler's writing is how the reader can get caught unaware by its emotional force. I laughed my way through a lot of the book, and was surprised when I started to worry about the narrator, to care about her family. I was surprised by the poignancy of memories of my own childhood her writing evoked. It's definitely a book to which I will return a few more times.

This is not an awful book. It has interesting characters, an intriguing background, an unusual voice and lots of good intentions. But here's a lesson for new writers: all of the above is not enough for a good book.
One thing that this book lacked was a focus. A story doesn't need to be linear to be good, but it does require a thread. It needs to bring the reader to a certain point, to gain something that for a lack of a better word I'll call an insight. It doesn't happen here. I struggled with this book for weeks until I was able to finish it. The writing had too much stream of conscious that didn't cover the absence of a plot. I guess that the book can be called half-baked. A good editor might have been helpful in making this into something that gives the reader more than the sense of relief that it's over upon finishing it.

Honestly I cannot decide if I like this book. The descriptions of her family is engaging and I did enjoy the characters. The thing is when I think back on having read the book, I do not feel like I got anything out having read it. There just is no progression. While reading I kept thinking that the author was using her memories of her past to explain something, but it never comes to pass.

The feel of the book is similar to frequently listening to a friend ramble on about her childhood. You just get to the point of saying enough already!

This scattershot plotted book is charming, funny, haunting, but is it a novel? You will adore the characters. Jem examines her family through the filters of medeival history and her somewhat skewed understanding of physics, with charming conclusions drawn. Her compilation of "evidence" as to just who and what her mother is (possibly a Druid, possibly a good witch) is especially entertaining. The wordplay between her and her brothers, "Rule 28," and her poetic descriptions of Harriet, her fey sister, make you want to move in with this family. But the book is circuitous and anecdotal, and the glimpses of the modern Jem leave the reader troubled, but with no answers. I was left feeling like a distraught neighbor, wringing my hands and saying, "But they were such a lovely family! What happened to poor Jem?"

Despite the considerable writing talents of Emma Richler, her debut collection of short stories, "Sister Crazy," will leave readers strangely distanced from the family the author struggles so desperately to bring to life. Her protagonist, Jemima (Jem) Weiss inhabits a family at once lovingly interconnected but simultaneously remote from one another. Richler never determines which description most adequately represents the Weiss family, and, as a result, her writing wanders from sensitive appraisal to gushing sentimentality. Although Jem provides the narration and perspective on her youth and somewhat surprising deteriorating adult life, she does so without much coherence. Perhaps this is due to the anthologized nature of a short story collection. In reality, the order of the stories cannot save this effort.

Richler tantalizes her readers with thematically rich questions. What stresses exist on the middle daughter of a mixed marriage, one which combines parents of different religions and nationalities? Is it possible to love one's family too much, and, if so, what stresses and strains result on the child once she attains adulthood? Why would a secular Jewish father and urbane Protestant mother send sensitive children to a repressive Catholic private school? Can adults find the internal strength and courage to confront a seemingly idyllic, eventless childhood to discover the roots of adult disaffection? Unfortunately, Richler never extends her stories or her characters to provides serious answers, much less discussion, of these questions.

What remains is a series of short stories which orbit aimlessly around the themes of family life. Other than the title short story, this anthology is eerily devoid of emotion. Constant anecdotal vignettes about the idiosyncratic personalities of each member cannot subsitute for substantive development of chracter. Excessive descriptions of matters esoteric, especially films, further sap energy from a volume desperate for emotional charge.

Practically every five pages, Emma Richler reminds us that her family literally shakes with "mirth." Unfortunetly, her readers will not do the same.

Sister Crazy is a story about a middle child who adores her siblings. She be-friends them with their quirky personalities and thrives on their presence in her life. I could not finish this book because I couldn't find the thread that binded the chapters together. I couldn't find the reasoning why they moved around alot or why the main character is actually crazy. I want to realistically assume that it is a genetic disease because her mother is mentally unstable not because her siblings went on with their lives and left her to find her own life.