The Alter sisters lead fairly secluded lives in their Manhattan apartment, happy to spend their time in each other’s company. There’s the eldest, Lady, a divorcee, middle child Vee who lost her much loved husband quite young, and baby Delph, forever single and supposedly happy about it.
Together they are writing their memoirs, which doubles as a joint suicide note. Come December 31st, 1999, the Alter sisters intend to take their lives. But first they want to explain. They want to lay out the history of their family so we can understand the curse that has been following them. Their great-grandfather was a Nobel Prize-winning chemist who unfortunately also invented something horrible that killed millions during WWII. But he is only part of their story, the beginning, and on from him come more scuffles with fate and a tendency for suicide. They’re ready for their family to be done. But as they bump up their timeline someone stumbles to their door with a different version of events. Will it be enough to set them on a different path?
Part of my goal for this year in terms of reading is to take books off my shelves before getting them from the library, which I had been doing for most of last year. This meant ignoring the growing pile of to be read books which people so lovingly bought me for xmas and birthdays. So I’m working my way through them. This I bought a while ago in a library sale (would we say ironically?), mostly for the cover I think. I’m glad I finally found my way to it.
The book is told for the most part by all three sisters at once. It is ‘we’ and ‘us’ not ‘I’, which can take a little getting used to. But it especially works when they go on to tell the story of their ancestors. It was interesting to me that, even though no one sister sticks out in the beginning as the narrator, I felt like it was Delph who was speaking. She does later pick up the narrative alone for a bit. I don’t know if that was intentional/unintentional by the author or whether it was just random on my part, but she was definitely the one I leaned toward as a character and how relatable she was. The sisters are very different and yet their love for each other shines through in everything. And for something that handles heavy subjects like suicide, cancer, murder, and death camps, it has a dark humour running throughout from each of them.
The writing is lovely and a lot of research has obviously gone in to so much of it – from the war to fabric dyes. The author’s note at the end states that, while several characters are based on real people, it is fiction. I confess to looking stuff up on wiki while reading to see if this was a true story at all. I guess that just means the author did a great job.