BookBrowse Reviews The Sisters K by Maureen Sun

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A suspenseful retelling of The Brothers Karamazov about three sisters grappling with their abusive father's impending death.

The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of cancer. Minah, the eldest, is a high-functioning New York City lawyer determined to start a family. Sarah is a literature professor at Rutgers and has just become reacquainted with her elder sister after estranging herself from her family for over a decade. Esther, the youngest and in some ways most coddled, has been adrift after dropping out of college a few years prior. Their father, Eugene, has moved to New Jersey to live in an apartment complex he owns as part of a real estate portfolio that makes up a significant portion of his vast wealth. He arrives with expectations that his daughters care for him in his final days, and also with a bombshell: he has an "illegitimate" son named Edgar, who is a doctor living in New York. But this is not the sentimental tale of a family uniting to say goodbye to a beloved patriarch. Eugene, we learn from the beginning, terrorized his two eldest daughters during their youth with verbal and physical abuse (Esther was spared largely because she managed to ingratiate herself with the family next door and therefore was rarely at home).

Minah is determined to swallow her fury and make nice with her father because she wants to inherit his wealth (rumored to total in the millions), and she convinces Sarah, who despite being Eugene's "favorite" was the most frequently victimized, to do the same. Minah believes Edgar is likewise on the scene solely to get his name into Eugene's will. And if Eugene dies before writing a will at all, she knows that a court is likely to recognize Edgar as an equal beneficiary to Eugene's "legitimate" children. This, to Minah, would be an injustice, given that Edgar never suffered the abuse Eugene inflicted on his daughters.

In her debut novel, Maureen Sun deftly excavates the psychological fallout from parental abuse through the personalities, ambitions, and failures of the three sisters. Minah has latched on to the prospects of family, religion, and heritage making her whole. The only one of the sisters to have spent time in Korea, being Korean is important to her in a way that it isn't to the others, whose only reference point to their heritage is Eugene. Minah recalls initially feeling like her genetic connection to her father was a "disease," and being rejected by some of her peers in school because she was Asian. But after traveling to Korea, she had an awakening:

"It's amazing how much racism I'd internalized. So much self-loathing. That's why I went to Korea after high school, to stop hating myself and learn more about myself. I learned to speak Korean. I learned more about my family. But I still wanted more than anything not to be his child."

Sarah, the most tragic of the three, has never made it past that last sentiment, and in fact her hatred of Eugene consumes her life. Her career is in stasis because she lacks the ruthless ambition required for a life in academia. Her brilliant mind for literature withers teaching freshman composition classes and she avoids romance after her first serious boyfriend left her for another woman. A great part of the novel's suspense centers on Sarah's fragile psyche, as she seems to have been hanging by a thread even before Eugene reentered her life.

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.

While The Sisters K is compelling from a psychological perspective, it is also fundamentally riveting and well-crafted from a storytelling perspective. More than any other book in recent memory, I read it, compulsively, to find out what happened next. Even if you have read the source material, you won't predict the events of the climax and last act. Like Dostoevsky's masterpiece, it's a plot that goes heavy on twists while maintaining credibility. And the ending largely satisfies—while everyone may not get exactly what they deserve, Sun demonstrates that the small, vicious, petty people will generally be undone by their own meanness and reap the loneliness they sowed with their cruelty.

With realistic and layered characters—Sarah and Minah are especially complex and vivid, but readers who have experience with a controlling, narcissistic, dictatorial man will be disturbed by the authenticity of Eugene—and a story that quietly simmers with intrigue until it boils over spectacularly, The Sisters K is an arresting portrait of rage, resentment, trauma, and revenge.

This review first ran in the November 20, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.