The Trouble with Sisters

I read Amanda Eyre Ward's How to be Lost over the past two days. I found it in the unofficial work library of books people don't really want any more and had put off reading it until I was desperate for lexical sustenance.

But it's really really good. Baldly, it's about a damaged family who lost a child and the search for her many years later. But there is depth and character and emotion and humnour behind the deceptively simple prose. One of the characters lives in New Orleans for a while but not in a touristy way. More a poor cocktail waitress way living in a African American neighbourhood and driving home drunk from bars every night. This was really well described but I smiled when she went to the Camellia Grill for breakfast one day because I had an omelette there one day as a tourist. (The next day I ordered hominy grits somewhere else and would have had collard greens if I'd remembered) So maybe locals wouldn't think she was that local.

She has a really good ear for dialogue and her pop music references were spot on. What I loved though was her description of the distance that grew between the adult sisters. They were very close as children but recriminations build up and it gets to be easier not to talk at all rather than have the same argument each week. This seemed very true to life.

Then again my favourite moment of all was the loud resolution not to go home for Christmas being undermined immediately by a parent. Been there. Hardest thing I've ever done was not to fly home for Christmas.