OP's Husband Has Secret Pictures of Her Sister
Half Sisters by Virginia Franken is a r/AITA wet dream.
She’d sat on the news for four long hours.
I think most people will say they have a contentious relationship with their siblings. It took a good few years until I could comfortably say my younger brother was a cool dude and not just someone I had to put up with — an experience corroborated by friends with their own younger siblings.
However, not all of us are lucky enough to see our relationships with our siblings improve. If you’ve ever spent any time on r/relationships, you would have seen countless posts where people’s lives are upended by the fact they never managed to repair their relationships with a family member. People are hurt. People get robbed. Sometimes, people even die.
In that subreddit, you can have a front seat to the flaming shit shows that are other people’s families. And if you’re like me and you’re subscribed to said forum because you enjoy the drama, then Half Sisters may be the book for you.
Years after her half-sister Emily was sent away for bad behaviour, Maddy learns from her husband, Joseph, that her half-sibling has re-entered society and is now completely reformed. But Maddy can’t shake the feeling her sister hasn’t changed all that much, especially when she finds photos of Emily on Joseph’s phone, despite his claims he only ran into the other woman for a short while.
Half Sisters by Virginia Franken read like an extended r/relationships post. From the get-go, you can sense that Maddy is not a reliable narrator when it comes to her relationship with her half-sister. And while her husband may claim it’s early onset dementia (his way of gaslighting her), it’s quite obvious that the only thing really wrong with Maddy is that she’s a terrible person.
Everyone in this novel is unlikeable. This is not to say that Franken is a bad author; it’s clear that her goal here was to craft a situation in which there is nobody to root for. So as the novel progresses and we jump between each characters’ perspective, we get to delve into the motivations behind their lies, backstabbing and general assholery. Which, of course, raises the question: are any of their actions more forgivable than others?
To be honest, it’s not really a question worth answering. Just like a reddit post, sometimes the only thought you have is “I’m glad that’s not my family”. While there are times you’re glad to know other families are as dysfunctional as yours, spending too much time in their headspace can be a truly exhausting experience. Midway into this book, I wanted Half Sisters to be over so I didn’t have to spend any more time in these characters’ presence. I wanted all of them to go get therapy so I didn’t have to be burdened with their problems.
That’s the reason I’ve started to hang out in r/bestofredditorupdates. Over there, I get to know that these people who live in my phone eventually move on with their lives, that they’ve broken up from their terrible spouses and found love again, that they’ve found a new job and left to live on the other side of the world. But the ending of Half Sisters didn’t even give me that satisfaction and I was both annoyed that I had to live with the knowledge that I would never know what happened to Maddy and Emily, and relieved that I could finally leave them behind in their own universe.
I think Half Sisters can join my unofficial Don’t Shit Where You Eat collection.
Again, so many problems could have been resolved if Maddy just didn’t pursue a relationship with her half-sister’s ex. But then where would we, the terrible drama loving people we are, get our kicks?
So if you’re in need of knowing your family could be a lot worse, if you like frequenting subreddits where you can gawk at the drama from afar, Half Sisters is available for your rubbernecking pleasure. But if you’re a well-adjusted person—and I envy you—you may rightly wonder if there’s something wrong with the rest of us.
Rating: 3.5/5
Half Sisters by Virginia Franken was published by Lake Union Publishing and released June 2022. Thank you to NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for gifting me an ARC of this novel.