Invisible Sisters

Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of The Magnetic Girl delivers “an elegy for her dead sisters . . . a heartfelt, painful family saga, skillfully told by a survivor” (Kirkus Reviews). When Jessica Handler was eight years old, her younger sister Susie was diagnosed with leukemia. To any family, the diagnosis would have been upending, but to the Handlers, whose youngest daughter, Sarah, had been born with a rare, fatal blood disorder, it was an unimaginable verdict. Struck by the unlikelihood of siblings sick with diametrically opposed illnesses, the medical community labeled the Handlers’ situation a bizarre coincidence. By the time she was nine years old, Jessica had begun to introduce herself as the “well sibling.” Deeply moving and exquisitely written, Invisible Sisters is an extraordinary story of coming of age as the odd one out—as the daughter of progressive Jewish parents who moved to the South to participate in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as the healthy sister among sick, and eventually, as the only sister left standing. In a book that is as hard to forget as it is to put down, Handler captures the devastating effects of illness and death on a family and the triumphant account of one woman’s enduring journey to step out of the shadow of loss to find herself anew. “An unsentimental but deeply moving look at the ways in which loss––loss past and the loss that is still to come––can shape lives . . . a quiet, near-hypnotic tour de force.”—Michael Wex, New York Times bestselling author of Born to Kvetch “Both heartbreaking and hopeful.”—Ann Hood, bestselling author of The Book That Matters Most