Review of My sister, The serial killer
After seeing this book dominate all the blog accounts I follow on various social media platforms all of summer and Autumn, I was thrilled to receive this book for Christmas and join the hype across bookstagram. It was a 2019 Booker prize shortlister as well as a Womens prize for fiction shortlister, this combined with glowing reviews littered all over the cover really set the bar high for my first Brathwaite read.
A second hobby of mine (The first being reading, naturally) is true crime. I love psychology, i adore the dark 'stuff' and always have so this novel seemed an ideal cocktail. The literary algorithm fucked up. Again.
I rated this book two stars on my Goodreads account (@alishafaye) for several reasons so lets explore them.
My general opinion was that the characters felt very two dimensional, this is a fast paced novel and not to fit the exhilarating plot, at least not in my opinion. The quick paced writing style makes the novel read much more like a screenplay and less like a book with a dense narrative structure. It lacks description, except short one or two lines but even these are a rare find within the text. The result of this? it made it a challenge to even care about the protagonist, a victim close to a volatile serial killer, and if the reader barely cared about the protagonist, their lifeline into the fictive world, then they surely will not give a rats ass about what happens to the other characters in the text. This screenplay like writing also made for a lack of the author's psychological exploration of her protagonist but writers out there, when your reader picks up a book yes you're right to not spoon feed them everything otherwise they would lose interest and if they wanted to impersonate a zombie they would dress as one for Halloween but that being said, you cannot leave your reader alone in the dark and not even leave a flashlight on the floor next to them as Braithwaite has done. Especially if you are writing a book of this genre.
The protagonist, Korede doesn't seem to share much speculation of what thoughts and feelings are going through her sisters mind, she is more just like 'i wish she would stop murdering innocent men, its kind of a source of stress and minor inconvenience for me'. She lacks empathy like her sister but why? Lazy writing or does she too have the potential to be a serial killer? I'd love to know but frankly I don't think I would care much about a sequel to explore that route. This non empathetic personality would usually work being the sister of a serial killer but Korede's whole personality is based on being worlds apart from her monster of a sister, she is meant to be who the reader connects with. On top of this she is a hard working head nurse at her hospital who is practically single-handedly responsible for waking a man up out of a coma after his entire family has given up on him! During one section of the narrative she is highly anxious about her sister murdering the man she has feelings for and yet when the man turns out to be safe and her sister partially meets her deserved fate Korede acts in complete juxtaposition to how she previously verbally expressed.
Another issue I had with this book is the lack of Modus Operandi and motif. Again, we are left to speculate in the dark. Ayoola's entire character doesn't feel thought through. she feels rushed. The author potentially desired her to appear stuck in the teenage self her trauma left her in but her past is glossed over in brief sections which again don't overtly explore how the events made her feel and as a result of this her adult self feels disconnected from the teenage version of her character. She simply feels like a spoilt fourteen year old brat especially with the frequent alluding to social media apps like Instagram and I felt this was especially highlighted during the moment where she shares her stab wounds via Snapchat; the most youthful app there is apart from Tik Tok. She is neither accepted nor successfully depicted as an emotionless menace or a socially deviant adult who has become such due to childhood abuse. The only real obvious descriptions of her are mostly about her clothes in sentence long descriptions which have no reason to be present if they reveal nothing about her as a character such how she sees herself or how she wishes others to view her because she wears the most mundane clothes.
The entire book feels like a semi fast paced nothingness that as soon as it starts to build in the last hundred pages or so (which also see an increase in the quality of writing) stops building. It doesn't demolish itself, it simply stops as if the author walked away from her chair because it was time for dinner.
I'm glad I tried this book and to the younger reader I would recommend but I think I will be looking into other Booker prize shortlisters.
A second hobby of mine (The first being reading, naturally) is true crime. I love psychology, i adore the dark 'stuff' and always have so this novel seemed an ideal cocktail. The literary algorithm fucked up. Again.
I rated this book two stars on my Goodreads account (@alishafaye) for several reasons so lets explore them.
My general opinion was that the characters felt very two dimensional, this is a fast paced novel and not to fit the exhilarating plot, at least not in my opinion. The quick paced writing style makes the novel read much more like a screenplay and less like a book with a dense narrative structure. It lacks description, except short one or two lines but even these are a rare find within the text. The result of this? it made it a challenge to even care about the protagonist, a victim close to a volatile serial killer, and if the reader barely cared about the protagonist, their lifeline into the fictive world, then they surely will not give a rats ass about what happens to the other characters in the text. This screenplay like writing also made for a lack of the author's psychological exploration of her protagonist but writers out there, when your reader picks up a book yes you're right to not spoon feed them everything otherwise they would lose interest and if they wanted to impersonate a zombie they would dress as one for Halloween but that being said, you cannot leave your reader alone in the dark and not even leave a flashlight on the floor next to them as Braithwaite has done. Especially if you are writing a book of this genre.
The protagonist, Korede doesn't seem to share much speculation of what thoughts and feelings are going through her sisters mind, she is more just like 'i wish she would stop murdering innocent men, its kind of a source of stress and minor inconvenience for me'. She lacks empathy like her sister but why? Lazy writing or does she too have the potential to be a serial killer? I'd love to know but frankly I don't think I would care much about a sequel to explore that route. This non empathetic personality would usually work being the sister of a serial killer but Korede's whole personality is based on being worlds apart from her monster of a sister, she is meant to be who the reader connects with. On top of this she is a hard working head nurse at her hospital who is practically single-handedly responsible for waking a man up out of a coma after his entire family has given up on him! During one section of the narrative she is highly anxious about her sister murdering the man she has feelings for and yet when the man turns out to be safe and her sister partially meets her deserved fate Korede acts in complete juxtaposition to how she previously verbally expressed.
Another issue I had with this book is the lack of Modus Operandi and motif. Again, we are left to speculate in the dark. Ayoola's entire character doesn't feel thought through. she feels rushed. The author potentially desired her to appear stuck in the teenage self her trauma left her in but her past is glossed over in brief sections which again don't overtly explore how the events made her feel and as a result of this her adult self feels disconnected from the teenage version of her character. She simply feels like a spoilt fourteen year old brat especially with the frequent alluding to social media apps like Instagram and I felt this was especially highlighted during the moment where she shares her stab wounds via Snapchat; the most youthful app there is apart from Tik Tok. She is neither accepted nor successfully depicted as an emotionless menace or a socially deviant adult who has become such due to childhood abuse. The only real obvious descriptions of her are mostly about her clothes in sentence long descriptions which have no reason to be present if they reveal nothing about her as a character such how she sees herself or how she wishes others to view her because she wears the most mundane clothes.
The entire book feels like a semi fast paced nothingness that as soon as it starts to build in the last hundred pages or so (which also see an increase in the quality of writing) stops building. It doesn't demolish itself, it simply stops as if the author walked away from her chair because it was time for dinner.
I'm glad I tried this book and to the younger reader I would recommend but I think I will be looking into other Booker prize shortlisters.
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