Shred Sisters

Starred review from August 1, 2024
The younger of two siblings grows up in the shadow of her beautiful, reckless, mentally ill sister. "Here are the ways I could start this story," Amy Shred says, offering three choices in a brief prologue to memoirist and literary agent Lerner's debut novel. "Olivia was breathtaking." "For a long time, I was convinced that she was responsible for everything that went wrong." "No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister." The engaging, thoughtful voice established here goes on to unfold the story of Amy's childhood, coming of age, and early adulthood, all profoundly shaped by the wild trajectory of her older sister: a rebel, a runaway, a mental patient, a dropout, a thief, a missing person. Amy herself--called Bunny or Bun in the family--is the classic supersmart miserable outsider, bullied at school, friendless, always bewildered at the utter unfairness of life. What could be a nice normal Connecticut Jewish family is anything but as Amy's parents are pushed far beyond their ability to cope, and ultimately their ability to stay married. Amy finishes a science major at college in three years and throws herself into graduate work at a lab at Columbia University, zigzags into publishing, finally loses her virginity, meets the man she will marry, and goes into therapy. The story unfolds with the verisimilitude of a memoir: Amy's nuanced relationships with her mother, her father, and her partners are all utterly convincing and relatable. Her mother, Lorraine, is a particularly fine creation, both a very specific East Coast Jewish type and an archetypal maternal presence. "In the months and years after she died, I often saw the world through her eyes, as if I had inherited her mantle of judgment, her scoreboard in the sky." Many of us know that feeling exactly. A seamlessly constructed and absorbing fictional world, full of insight about how families work.

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August 5, 2024
Literary agent Lerner (Food and Loathing, a memoir) traces the impact of mental illness on a pair of sisters in her moving debut novel. Amy, the narrator, describes herself as studious and highly motivated compared to her wild and beautiful older sister, Olivia, who frequently engages in risky or outright illegal behavior, from shoplifting to disappearing for days a time. As the sisters grow up, Ollie’s misbehavior poses greater dangers, not only for herself, but also for their parents and for Amy’s friendships, romantic relationships, and even her career. Ollie’s condition isn’t named until late in the novel; part of Lerner’s skilled approach to narrative lies in subtly depicting the destigmatizing of mental illness and the evolution of treatment during the period from the sisters’ childhood in the 1970s through the 1990s. Lerner’s portrayal of Amy’s five-year course of therapy is particularly rewarding, as Amy explores the limits and strengths of her bond with Olivia. The result is a quietly lovely and ultimately hopeful chronicle of a complicated family. Agent: David Black, David Black Agency.

September 1, 2024
Beautiful, charming, manipulative, and impetuous, Olivia Shred turns epically reckless and downright feral. She leaves Amy, her clutched-up, brainy, and bullied younger sister, bereft and propels the break-up of their parents' marriage. In her magnetizing, zippy, painfully and sweetly funny first novel of a family under siege, Lerner has aspiring scientist Amy narrate as she determines that being a workaholic is the only way forward. She clings to reason, structure, and routine, while Ollie swoops into and out of her life, by turns f ilthy and starving or radiant and mischievous but always seductive and scheming, always in the grip of a bedeviling mental illness. As Amy's grand plan collapses, "man-child" Josh relieves her of many of her inhibitions as she stumbles away from the laboratory and into publishing, forever bracing for her sister's next crisis. The perfectly named Shred sisters' ups and downs are wrenching and felicitous, while Amy is a triumph of clashing emotions, self-sabotage and self-preservation, anguish, loyalty, and love. Aerodynamic prose, psychological acuity, tangy wit, knotty family dynamics, and heady twists and turns make for an exhilarating read.

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December 20, 2024

Lerner, author of The Forest for the Trees and coauthor with Temple Grandin of a series of New York Times bestsellers, writes the story of two sisters, the shining Ollie and the younger Amy, over the course of 20 years. Amy hopes to become a researcher, while Ollie develops bipolar disorder and slips in and out of contact with her sister. Prepub Alert.

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