15 Books Centering Sisters
A while ago, one of my friends tweeted that she wanted recommendations for fiction centering sisters.
I had many recommendations, so I thought I would make my reading list available for everyone. Books appear in alphabetical order by title.
Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
Two half-sisters – one in the Dominican Republic, and one in New York City – find out about each other after their shared father dies in a plane crash. This is a YA book written in verse and I loved it when I read it earlier this year. It has the perfect balance of lightness and drama and it is heartwarming to watch the two main characters find comfort in each other in the face of tragedy. It is also an excellent portrayal of the different approaches people have to grief, and grief's wave-like nature. I am very picky when it comes to poetry/writing in verse, and I found this novel to be beautifully written.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
A classic sisters book – Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy navigate adolescence and early adulthood together during the American Civil War and befriend their rich neighbor, Laurie. There are a lot of reasons to love this book, 150 years later, even though parts of it are outdated. I have written more about it here. I am absolutely planning to read it again soon.
My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Possibly the opposite of Little Women, My Sister the Serial Killer is all about tension and suspense. A meticulous nurse helps clean up her younger sister's crime scenes after she murders each of her boyfriends. Things get sticky when her sister starts dating the coworker at the hospital on whom she also has a crush. It has the creepy and comedic vibes of the "Sisters" song from White Christmas: "Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister, and Lord help the sister who comes between me and my man."
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
Another classic sisters book! Bonus for having multiple generations of sisters. The movie is a Halloween classic and the book is equally delightful. Sisters raised by their witchy aunts are polar opposites and live very different lives until the boyfriend of one of them turns up dead. In addition to the sisterhood and family bonds in this story, there is also a plotline about finding romance after widowhood. This book is the perfect blend of comforting cottagecore and spooky vibes.
The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
Another tale of multiple generations of sisters! We love. I have talked about this book a lot because it is great and everyone should read it, so I will keep this short. The lives of four Istanbulite sisters, their mother, their step-grandmother, and their daughter-niece are turned upside down when their Armenian-American step-niece comes to visit to explore her own family history. This book explores the nature of loneliness and healing from tragedy and generational trauma. Trigger warnings for sexual violence, verbal abuse, and genocide.
The Brown Sisters series by Talia Hibbert
Another sisters series I have been hyping up – these books are shaping up to be some of my favorite books of 2021. The three books in this series, Get a Life, Chloe Brown, Take a Hint, Dani Brown, and Act Your Age, Eve Brown, all focus on one sister and their romance, but the other sisters are always excellent and fully-present side characters. You can tell they grew up in a loving and supportive home and have a close bond. They challenge each other and help each other grow and it's delightful to experience.
The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray
An intergenerational family drama about two sets of sisters: the eldest of the first set of sisters suddenly gets incarcerated and leaves her sisters to care for her twin teenage daughters. The story has elements of mystery and suspense, but for the most part, it is about family bonds and meshing the different methods of healing after tragedy. Trigger warnings for physical and emotional abuse and incarceration.
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Celie and her sister, Nettie, have been separated by Celie's abusive husband. They spend most of this story apart from each other, living very different lives, but always think about each other, trying to find a way back together. This classic epistolary novel explores loneliness and togetherness and healing from personal and systemic trauma (a theme for this post, I am noticing). Trigger warnings for abuse and sexual violence.
The Jewel Kingdom series by Jahnna N. Malcolm
A delightful and magical children's series about four sisters who are each given a section of their parents' realm to rule when they reach adolescence. They all have cute magical animal companions who advise them in their leadership roles and there is much frolicking through the forest with fairies and going on adventures in the snow. Sadly, these are now out of print, but if you can find copies of any of them, I highly recommend reading them!
The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
This Japanese novel is set in 1930s Japan and shows the relationship between four adult sisters in a series of vignettes. The overarching plot is that the two older, married sisters wish to find suitable husbands for the two younger sisters, which comes with several challenges. The three younger sisters live together as well, so they are constantly playing off each other. There is a lot of calming domestic imagery and the descriptions of food are all excellent – make sure you eat before reading this book, otherwise, you will get very hungry.
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
More witchy sisters! Three estranged sisters, raised by their witchy grandmother, meet again by chance at a protest for women's suffrage in 1893 and renew their relationship. The writing style of this book is very unique and it gelled well with me, but I can see others not enjoying the style. I have already reviewed this book individually, so I will not say much else about it here, but I rated it five stars. I also made sure to buy myself a nice hardcover edition of it, since I want to read it again and had previously gotten it through my library.
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Recently shortlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize in Fiction and absolutely worth the hype. Identical light-skinned twins Black, Stella and Desiree, are inseparable until Stella chooses to pass as a white woman and moves to Los Angeles. Both sisters have daughters whose lives intersect in the future and we find out through them how their mothers have changed through their lives apart. Another five-star read for me and I am absolutely planning on re-reading this in the future.
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
Sisters but make it cult. Three sisters grow up on an island with their strict and abusive parents who use "the water cure" as a purification ritual. The three of them are left on their own after their parents leave them, and they continue their unhealthy water cure practices. Then two men and a boy show up on their shores and things get weird. Trigger warnings for cult behaviors and abuse.
This book captures the feeling of oppressive summer very well, with a very claustrophobic, close, undercurrent of dread and foreboding, as well as its imagery of physical sickness and mental and emotional anguish. In this way, it is similar to Nobber by Oisín Fagan. Also in common with Nobber is a disturbing sexual undertone and the idea that with hot weather comes loose morals a la Emily, the mother in Atonement. This seems especially true of adult men and their creepy obsessions with younger and/or immature girls. In The Water Cure, Llew (one of the strange men) is interested in Lia, clearly at least partly because she’s “forbidden” and also naïve and pliable. In Nobber, this same dynamic shows up between the traveling merchant and Mary. He explicitly tells her she is the perfect age for desirability – 16 – and seems to see her clear mental illness as an extra layer of desirability, rather than a sign that she might not be able to give proper consent, at least in her current state (but it’s set in fourteenth-century Ireland, so it’s not like there was much concern for women’s consent then anyway). The oppressive heat has a different character in The Water Cure and Nobber. The summer in Nobber is dry and dusty, and throat-clogging where the summer in The Water Cure is humid, sticky, and throat-tightening. There is abundant water for the sisters in The Water Cure, as the name suggests, and every instance it is mentioned, it has a different significance, which was a variant that kept me interested while I was reading. I find the comparison with The Virgin Suicides (a bonus sisters book for this list!) to be a half-accurate choice. I mostly found The Virgin Suicides disturbing because of the group of boys shamelessly stalking those sisters and the romanization of their captivity by their parents and their interpretation of religion as well as their eventual suicides. Their captivity became a creepy metaphor for their repressed sexuality that, if given free rein, would have rightfully belonged to the stalker boys.
The Water Cure also focuses on sisters and their forced and semi-religious cult-like captivity by their parents. But in this case, instead of stalking, their boundaries are violated by men breaching the literal, physical boundaries of their captivity. The repressed sexuality of Lia becomes a thing that is given out of curiosity, even though it is clear that Llew expects it of her, much like the stalker boys of the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides. In the end, both sets of sisters take agency and end their captivity, thereby also escaping the creepiness of the men/boys who sexualized them.
Three Wishes by Lianne Moriarty
All of Lianne Moriarty's books I have read so far involve identical multiples of some kind. This one puts a set of triplets – two identical, and one not – at the heart of the story and shows their adult relationships and rivalries. Each chapter begins with an observation of the three of them at some point in their lives by a stranger – the first one being an observation of their 34th birthday dinner, where they get into a giant argument and start throwing things at each other in the restaurant – so you know from the beginning it is going to be a wild ride.
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
Last but not least, this book has the same wholesome vibes as Little Women, but this is set in the UK in the 1830s. Two teenage girls and polar opposites, Molly and Cynthia, become step-sisters when their middle-aged parents get married. They get along well, despite their growing pains in their new situation, and also befriend their rich neighbors, a la Little Women. The stakes are a little higher in this book, however, and it courts some dark themes before coming to the happy ending (classic Gaskell). I know I should read other Gaskell novels before returning to this one, but it is just so delightful.
I hope you enjoy these books about sisters! As you can probably tell, I love the themes of sisterhood in my books, so if you have any sister recommendations, please let me know!
You can watch my video exploring these books here:
