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Book Reviewed by:"You're my sister, but I'm not sure I love you. I'm not sure I love anyone. But if someone hurt you I'd want to kill him. I'd want him to die in pain. And he has hurt you…"
After years of estrangement, Minah, Sarah, and Esther have been forced together again. Called to their father's deathbed, the sisters must confront a man little changed by the fact of his mortality. Vicious and pathetic in equal measure, Eugene Kim wants one thing: to see which of his children will abject themselves for his favor— and more importantly, his fortune. From their childhood in California to the depths of a mid-Atlantic winter, the solitary sisters Kim must face a brutal past colliding with their present. Grasping at their broken bonds of sisterhood, they will do what is necessary to escape the tragedy of their circumstances—whatever the cost.
For Minah, the eldest, the money would be recompense for their father's cruelty. A practicing lawyer with an icy pragmatism, she dreams of a family of her own and sets to work on securing her inheritance. For Sarah, a gifted and embittered academic who wields her intelligence like a weapon, confronting her father again forces her to reckon with the desperation of her present life. It is left to the youngest— directionless and loving Esther— to care for their father in her lonely quest to do right by everyone. A fortune pales in comparison to the prospect of finally reuniting with her sisters.
With a legacy of violence haunting their lives, the sisters dare to imagine a better future even as their father's poison courses through their blood. A contemporary reimagining of Dostoevsky's dark classic, The Brothers Karamazov, Maureen Sun's brilliant debut is a vivid and visceral exploration of rage, shame, and the betrayals of intimacy.
Part I
The Daughters
The sisters Minah, Sarah, and Esther shared the same father but were not full-blooded siblings. And though they each considered the same woman their mother, they were not raised by the same women.
No one could or would tell Minah, the eldest, much about the woman who gave birth to her and, as their father claimed, abandoned her to return to Korea when she was one or two—the facts were never clear. He said that after her mother abandoned her he had no choice but to send Minah back to Korea to be with his brother's family. Minah couldn't remember them, only the day of her return to Los Angeles. She disembarked clutching at a flight attendant on a day in high summer and met Jeonghee, her new stepmother. Above and beyond them curved and stretched the vast glass corridors of LAX, where the infrastructure seemed to be protecting everyone from the heavens crushing them on all sides.
"There she is," Eugene indicated indifferently, already turning to ...
The Sisters K is a retelling of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, so the sisters are refracted through a prism of the source material as well as through the abuse they suffered in childhood. Minah is an impulsive spendthrift who seems the most likely to outright murder Eugene, much like the eldest Karamazov, Dmitri. Sarah, like her counterpart Ivan, is a bookish intellectual searching for something meaningful to believe in. Esther is the moral compass of the family, like the deeply spiritual Alexei. Edgar is based on the illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov, Smerdyakov, but Sun makes the shrewd choice to develop him into a more sympathetic character than Dostoevsky's. Edgar is conniving, but he is after Eugene's wealth for the sake of his son more than for his own benefit...continued
Full Review
(857 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
There's a brutal misogynist logic that underpins Korean patriarchal culture and yet it is so rarely dramatized this intimately in Korean American fiction; here it organizes every part of these sisters' lives, as it does for so many. Chilling, tender, fierce and sharp, the resulting novel is an inheritance drama where everyone is running from their family, one of the most original novels about sisters and family I've read in some time. Ling Ma, author of Severance and Bliss Montage
Clear-sighted and unafraid, The Sisters K is astoundingly perceptive in its insights about human nature. It is also beautifully written, its emotional intelligence apparent in every passage. This is, simply put, an excellent novel. Mary Gaitskill, author of Veronica
Amid the thousands of novels based on familial drama, The Sisters K stands as a true original. It is an intense, subtle and extremely complex story of love and hate, and, beyond that, the mystery of biological and emotional ties. In drawing her anguished, gallant characters, Maureen Sun has almost invented a new way of describing the inner lives of humans; it is an achievement.
Maureen Sun's The Sisters K was published by Los Angeles-based independent publisher Unnamed Press. Founded in 2014 by Chris Heiser and Olivia Taylor Smith, Unnamed Press was intended to be a publisher for international voices and translated literature but has since moved into domestic fare. The Press declares itself "committed to publishing a kaleidoscope of works that challenge the status quo," and in practice this means they have published some exceedingly strange and wonderful books over the past ten years. Their bare-bones staff includes Brandon Taylor (author of The Late Americans, 2023, and Real Life, 2020) as (seemingly the only) Acquisitions Editor, and Art Director Jaya Nicely churning out what is arguably some of the best ...
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