Reader's Place: January 3, 2023
SISTERS
“Sisters” refers primarily to women who share the same parents, but “sister” has many other meanings as well: a term of endearment, describing comrades, friends, women who share a deep bond of some sort. We can also learn from non-human sisters. In fiction and in non-fiction, we can find some of their stories.
Somewhere sisters: A Story of adoption, identity, and the meaning of family, by Erika Hayasaki, 2022. (Catalog)
Isabella and Ha, identical twin girls born in Vietnam, were raised on opposite sides of the world, each having no idea that the other existed. Erika Hayasaki's deeply reported, intimate story of their journey back to each other upends common conceptions of adoption, family, and identity.
Sisters in resistance: How a German spy, a banker’s wife, and Mussolini’s daughter outwitted the Nazis, by Tilar J. Mazzeo, 2022 (Catalog)
In 1944, the war had reached its climax in continental Europe. News of secret diaries kept by Italy's former Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, had permeated public consciousness. What wasn't reported, however, was how three women-a Fascist's daughter, a German spy, and an American socialite-risked their lives to ensure the diaries would reach the Allied forces, who would use the papers as key evidence against the Nazis at the Nuremberg Trials. One step ahead of Gestapo agents, they succeed in preserving one of the most important historic documents of the Second World War.
Sister friends forever, by Kimberla Lawson Roby, 2022. (Catalog)
Diane, Michelle, Kenya, and Lynette have known each other since they were small children. They grew up in different neighborhoods, but they also grew up in the same church (which is how they first met), and while they each attended different colleges, they never lost touch with each other. Now many years later, at age forty, they are still best friends forever and they meet for lunch on the first Saturday of every month, but their lives couldn't be more different
When we were sisters: a novel, by Fatimah Asghari, 2022. (Catalog)
Asghar traces the intense bond of three Muslim American orphaned siblings who, after their parents die, are left to raise one another. The youngest, Kausar, grapples with the incomprehensible loss of her parents as she also charts out her own understanding of gender; Aisha, the middle sister, spars with her "crybaby" younger sibling as she desperately tries to hold on to her sense of family in an impossible situation; and Noreen, the eldest, does her best in the role of sister-mother while also trying to create a life for herself, on her own terms.
The Bonobo sisterhood: Revolution through female alliance, by Diane L. Rosenfeld, 2022. (Catalog)
Gender violence expert and law professor Diane L. Rosenfeld pulls from the natural world, specifically bonobo society, to present a roadmap for ending gendered violence through female allyship.
Daughters of the flower fragrant garden: Two sisters separated by China’s civil war, by Zhuqing Li, 2022. (Catalog)
Scions of a once-great southern Chinese family that produced the tutor of the last emperor, Jun and Hong were each other's best friends until, in their twenties, they were separated by chance at the end of the Chinese Civil War. For the next thirty years, while one became a model Communist, the other a model capitalist, they could not even communicate. Zhuqing Li recounts her aunts' experiences with extraordinary sympathy and breathtaking storytelling. A microcosm of women's lives in a time of traumatic change, this is a fascinating, evenhanded account of the recent history of separation between mainland China and Taiwan.
Compiled by Ina Rimpau