Brother/Sister - Sean Olin

Brother/Sister – Sean Olin

Pages: 242 (ARC)
Publisher: Razorbill (Penguin)
Release Date: 4th August 2011

Other Titles by this Author: Killing Britney

Sensational and compelling
It’s FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC meets NATURAL BORN KILLERS.

WILL
How many times do I have to say it? Yes, I see the picture. It’s a body, obviously. It’s a dead body.

ASHELEY
You have to understand, I love my brother. I’m scared of him too, but...regardless of what he has or hasn’t done, I feel for him, you know.

WILL
I don’t care what happens to me, really, I don’t. But Asheley...she had nothing to do with any of this.

ASHELEY
It’s not like it sounds. He had a good heart. He trusted me. And I always did the best I could to help him.

WILL
It’s not her fault. None of it. Okay then. The guy in the photo. I killed him...but I had to. I had no choice. Why? That’s complicated. That’ll take a while.

I hadn’t read a single review of Brother/Sister before picking it up. I went solely on the very intriguing premise...

Both Asheley and Will change dramatically change throughout the course of the novel. Will began as a volatile and angry boy who seemed to be bordering autistic, but essentially, kind-hearted even though we’re told in the summary that he had murdered someone, he developed a sense of mania and danger. Asheley is a normal girl from an extraordinary family. She wants exactly what every other girl wants from high school: friends, a social life and a good relationship with her boyfriend. Instead gets a brother who the whole school thinks is a freak, an alcoholic mum and a dad who walked out on them when she was very little. But I was fascinated by how differently they saw themselves to how the other saw them. Sometimes the differences were staggering.

The second person, direct address that Brother/Sister is written in so unusual that it immediately grabbed my attention. In both perspectives of the dual narrative, our protagonists, Asheley and Will, are telling their story directly to us which I love. But as the story started to gain momentum I began to see how differently Asheley and Will saw and recorded their story. By the end of the novel I knew I had two unreliable narrators on my hands and with the final line, which I read about four times over trying to get it straight in my mind, I wasn’t completely sure of what did and didn’t happen.

I don't quite know what I was expecting from Brother/Sister¸ but what I definitely wasn’t expecting was the uncertainty. With the two unreliable narrators, the misrepresentations of each other and such unpredictable characters, I often had no idea at all where Sean Olin was taking me. This surprised me as the story was so clearly set up in the summary and the initial few chapters, but Brother/Sister continually threw me off which shocking events and revelations.

Brother/Sister is just as compelling and fascinating as it proclaims in the synopsis and I’m very excited for more people to discover it.

Thanks to Razorbill for sending me a copy to review.

Sophie