With empathy, grace, humor, and piercing insight, the author of gods in Alabama pens a powerful, emotionally resonant novel of the South that confronts the truth about privilege, family, and the distinctions between perception and reality—the stories we tell ourselves about our origins and who we really are.Superheroes have always been Leia Birch Briggs’ weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a … weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a comics convention, the usually level-headed graphic novelist is swept off her barstool by a handsome and anonymous Batman.
It turns out the caped crusader has left her with more than just a nice, fuzzy memory. She’s having a baby boy—an unexpected but not unhappy development in the thirty-eight year-old’s life. But before Leia can break the news of her impending single-motherhood (including the fact that her baby is biracial) to her conventional, Southern family, her step-sister Rachel’s marriage implodes. Worse, she learns her beloved ninety-year-old grandmother, Birchie, is losing her mind, and she’s been hiding her dementia with the help of Wattie, her best friend since girlhood.
Leia returns to Alabama to put her grandmother’s affairs in order, clean out the big Victorian that has been in the Birch family for generations, and tell her family that she’s pregnant. Yet just when Leia thinks she’s got it all under control, she learns that illness is not the only thing Birchie’s been hiding. Tucked in the attic is a dangerous secret with roots that reach all the way back to the Civil War. Its exposure threatens the family’s freedom and future, and it will change everything about how Leia sees herself and her sister, her son and his missing father, and the world she thinks she knows.
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This book is everything! Terrific writing. Romantic. Mysterious! I’m so glad that nobody told Joshilyn Jackson that you can only write about one thing. Because there are about 50 themes in here, and they’re all well done. Race, class, fear. It’s all in there. Oh, and there’s a romance! Don’t be fooled by the quiet cover–this is a book that’s bigger and louder than the pretty styling on the front.
Jackson never disappoints. I love her quirky characters.
I picked this book on the recommendation of a friend and was glad I did. The richly woven story of a small southern town and the Birch family had been turning the pages. I cried, laughed, cheered and hoped for each character in this book. The unflinching honesty of dealing with secrets of the past, unplanned pregnancy, dementia and aging reminded me how fragile life is and can change when we’re not looking.
Great book!! I had only scanned the jacket before reading this and was constantly surprised as the book unfolded. There’s a lot going on in this story which I really appreciated but at the same time, it was very easy to read. Readers from a small town will definitely connect with this book. I didn’t grow up that way but found it very interesting. I highly recommend this book! It would be a great book club read as well, I think.
OK – this one got me at both ends of the spectrum – laughing and crying. The story revolves around a single white woman who finds herself pregnant with the child of a black man after a one-night stand at a comic-con. She already has some complex family issues that are only exacerbated when she returns to her old southern hometown to care for her 90-year old grandmother. All kinds of family secrets come out of the woodwork then! The situations that come up, and the characters that are introduced there are both funny, and sad at the same time. The best thing about this story is the way the author addresses many different “hot” topics such as unplanned pregnancy, racism, and a whole slew of very real family issues in a way that is entertaining, but also sensitive, and serious. I liked the views given by the different characters (especially the strong main character) – it gives you a lot to think about from other perspectives. This book may not be for everyone, but I really enjoyed it. I chose the audio version, and was impressed with the narrator’s range of voices, and overall expression.
I really enjoyed this book. There were so many layers to the story. Just when you think it was heading in one direction, a new secret came to light that took the reader deeper into a past trajectory that would completely affect the future of the characters.
At its core it is a story of family and the deep love that makes us do things to protect those we love. This book also explores the underbelly of the genteel South covered up with casseroles and sweet tea. It offers hope and healing when the uglies are exposed.
I loved the characters in this book – who became like family. I especially enjoyed the relationship between the main character and her grandmother. I thought the author also did a good job of capturing the essence of a small Southern town and the people within. This is definitely a book I will recommend to friends.
The Almost Sisters is an engrossing tale of southern sisterhood under the thumb of a questionable — and often unreliable — patriarchal thumb. Best of all, it comes with a comic book superhero twist that all nerd dorks will adore. This is the first of her books that I’ve read, although others have tempted me. But when I looked at this one I didn’t hesitate; she had me at Batman.
Joshilyn Jackson’s writing is easy to ready, but so well crafted that her best sentences have a glow about them that sticks with you. Sentences like, ‘You can’t go around holding the worst thing you ever did in your hand, staring at it. You gotta cook supper, put gas in the car.” And my favorite: “The South was like that optical-illusion drawing of the duck that is at the same time a rabbit. I’d always see the duck first, his round eye cheery and his bill seeming to smile. But if I shifted my gaze, the duck’s bill morphed into flattened, worried ears. The cheery eye, reversed, held fear, and I could see only a solemn rabbit. The Souths were like that drawing. Both existed themselves, but they were so merged that I could shift from one and find myself inside the other without moving.”
This is a rare story. One that takes on the never-quite-post-racial underbelly of the south in such an interwoven way that the “us” and “them” shifts and slides under your feet, keeping you off balance, but longing for those spaces where all the “us”es turn into “we”s.
This may be my favorite book by my favorite author. She deals with race, the Old South, family, and Batman in equal measure — with a dash of mystery thrown in. What an incredible writer!
One of the beat books I have read 8n a long time.
Joshilynn Jackson is a wonderful storyteller. Just when you think you know where her story is going to go, she turns your assumptions on their heads.
The Almost Sisters by Joshilyn Jackson is one of the best novels, set in the south, that I have ever read! I loved it! The dialog, the characters and the descriptions of all things southern are just perfect. Sometimes moving, sometimes humorous— this novel took me through a whole range of emotions.
This is a captivating modern Southern, multi-generational Gothic tale about family, friendship, love, racism, murder, and the secrets hidden behind lace curtains.
This book combines a good old- fashioned read read: multi-generational characters, relatable problems ( financial strain, aging relatives, rebellious children) with a fresh, modern Southern heroine who is an illustrator and graphic novelist of a series called Violet and Violence. If Laurie Colwin were still alive and a Southern writer, she would have written something as beloved as this. Joshlynn Jackson writes such intriguing, not always lovable, women characters that you end up wanting the best for. If you don’t know her novels, I would recommend this one or the Opposite of Everything as places to start.
Like the Unhoneymooners, Almost Sisters is a work of fiction that has me questioning everything I thought I knew about my taste in books. Generally, my preferences run to non-fiction and historical fiction, with a bit of mystery writing and a dash of the classics. Almost Sisters is decidedly none of these – it even has, horror of horrors, more fantasy Con and gaming references than I could shake a stick at – and yet I really, really enjoyed it. It ended before I was ready, and I wondered if Joshilyn Jackson had set it up for a sequel.
Leia Birch Briggs is 38, single, and famous in the world of comic book illustrators, where she is one of the best. Almost Sisters opens with her discovering that, after a few too many tequilas at one recent ComicCon, she is also pregnant by a Batman whose features she can only vaguely recall. He was black, though, of that she is certain, which means she’ll have to tell her conservative, southern family that not only is she pregnant with a stranger’s child, but the baby will be biracial.
Her plan to share the news goes awry when her stepsister’s marriage implodes on the same day that her 90-year-old grandmother’s Lewy body dementia becomes very, very public to mroe or less the entire town of Birchville, Alabama. Leia’s grandmother is Birchie, and she is the reigning Birch, the last Birch residing in the town her forebear’s founded. The combination of events sends Leia directly to Birchville in the company of her 13-year-old niece, Lavender, where together they must convince Birchie and her equally elderly BFF to decamp for assisted living.
And then mayhem ensues. Lavender meddles in Leia’s life. Leia meddles in Lavender’s life (and by extension that of her stepsister and brother-in-law). And Birchie and Wattie share secrets they will stop at nothing to keep. The skeletons in the closet aren’t all metaphorical.
Five stars.
(This review was originally published at https://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2019/08/almost-sisters.html)
This book gave pause for thought as it addressed multi-racial issues then and now so very realistically. Very much enjoyed this author’s way with words and the pictures she has painted with them. Kinda wish the story continued on.
This was the first book I had read by this author, and it won’t be the last. The characters she created were genuine, flawed, and interesting. By flawed, I mean they were real in their appearance and personality. These were not gorgeous, Hollywood kind of women, but people you could identify with and root for. The story building was done well, drawing the me on and getting me totally invested in their lives. As soon as I finished it, I passed it on to my sister to read because I knew she would enjoy it, too.
Outstanding characters and a beautifully-crafted array of situations make this book part of my all-time favorites list. This story has lodged itself deep into my heart.
Filled with characters that you feel like you know. The plot has plenty of unexpected turns. Thoroughly enjoyed as a summertime read.
A great read. Characters who were mostly believable and quite entertaining. A dramatic unfolding of family history as well as a family’s way forward when life happens.
Loved the characters in this book and would recommend