Ratings2
Average rating4.5
No one will love you or hurt you more than a sister. "I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck." -- Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and A Book of Days From Betsy Lerner, celebrated author of The Bridge Ladies, comes a wry and riveting debut novel about family, mental illness, and a hard-won path between two sisters It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight, but when her stunning confidence morphs into something erratic and unpredictable, she becomes a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Put simply, she has no brakes. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, survives Ollie's bullying and outcast status throughout her school years. She dreams of winning a Nobel Prize and unlocking the mysteries of the mind. Amy believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. Except none of that can explain what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the bipolar disorder that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed world. As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place--first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships--every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. For all that upends and unsettles these sisters, an inextricable bond always draws them back. Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love. If anything is true it's what Amy learns on her road to self-acceptance: No one will love you or hurt you more than a sister.
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The Shred Sisters is a sad but hopeful book about family, mental illness, sisters and therapy. You see the damage done to the sister, mother and father of a person with mental illness. You also see that sometime love can help save a person and sometimes it can't. This book is well written - the characterization is remarkably nuanced and the actions of the characters are believable -there are no quick fixes or knights in shining armor that swoop in to save the day.