Review: Sister Suite
Christine Stroud
58 pages
Disorder Press (2017)
Read this if you like: hybrid stories, fragmented narratives, grief and loss narratives
tl;dr summary: Twin grieves and remembers her sister in the aftermath of her suicide
See the book on Disorder Press’ website
Continuing with my current small book obsession mentioned in the last review, here’s another one that plays in a different genre territory. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how Sister Suite is officially categorized. I could see justification for calling it a collection of linked prose poems, a novelette-in-micros—or bunches of other things, probably, and to be honest I don’t think it much matters what it’s called. It’s a narrative told in non-linear fragments that weave together into one very powerful arc that brings a fresh twist to narratives about grief.
I love the structure and construction of Sister Suite for several reasons. For one thing, it’s a smart way to handle what is a very heavy central story: the surviving twin processing her sister’s suicide. The reader needs a lot of places to stop and catch their breath in a narrative driven by that kind of grief, and the fragmented story allows that to happen.
This structure also reflects the grief of the narrator. The use of time toward the beginning feels like it’s intentionally jarring. It starts in spring of 2010, the last time the narrator sees Sister alive. Then it jumps forward to 2012 but immediately references Sister’s death two years before, giving the reader a kind of temporal whiplash that left me feeling the right kind of unsettled. The fragments continue to jump around through time, at first circling back to the spring of 2010 but then drifting outward, back into the past and ahead into the future, mirroring the way that Sister’s death is still a presence in the narrator’s life but no longer so central to it as she moves into the present day.
Another smart move was the mix of precise and vague time markers for the sections. I like that no definitive time was put on “Present Day”—that it allows the story to be ongoing, the narrator’s life continuing into an undefined “after”. In a sense, that allows Sister’s story to be ongoing, too, in the memories of the narrator. On the other end of the timeline, having the final section just be labeled “Summers” immediately imbues it with that feel of childhood memories, which are often anchored to a season more than a year.
Moving beyond structure into the words themselves, this book is a masterclass in using precise, telling details to build characters and history. The moments that are included from the past aren’t action-packed scenes—they’re everyday moments, but ones which show a new angle of Sister, the narrator, or their relationship. Cumulatively, these small scenes function like a mosaic, giving the reader a very complete, real-feeling picture of both twins.
The language is stunning throughout Sister Suite. Its lyricism is why I could see an argument for calling some of these prose poems, and the rhythm and movement of the language is used well to highlight key moments in the arc. Maybe my favorite moment of this is on page 18, when the narrator and her father learn that Sister died. After the phone call:
“I put my hands in my lap. I let one hold the other. My dad says my sister’s name. He says my sister’s name. My hands clasp tight to one another.”
The starkness of the language there, combined with the repetition and the focus on the hands, effectively conveys someone who is stunned to numb. It artfully wields a lack of emotion to make the reader feel the full impact of the loss.
The catharsis moment in “Just Sister” is another one I want to highlight, both for its language and its use of sensory detail. The scene centers on a memory summoned up by a rogue scent of watermelon. The way this detail is woven into both the memory and the story’s present nicely lampshades its importance in a way that’s natural to the voice.
Sister Suite is a beautiful, powerful book that, to me, is a prime example of formal experimentation done well. I would definitely recommend it to fans of hybrid works—while it’s all in a prose format, it blends poetic and prose devices in a very artful way. In the end, it is heartbreaking and haunting but also looks forward, with a kind of grim optimism that gives the reader space to breathe. The fact that it fits all of that into such a slim little book is a feat that makes Sister Suite worth reading on its own.
See similar posts: