Book Review: The Good Sister by Jamie Kain

Quick Facts

My Rating: 5 stars

Series: N/A

Date Read: October 4, 2014

Source: Free review copy from Netgalley

Publication Date: October 7, 2014

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Genres: Young adult, contemporary

Summary (taken from Goodreads): The Kinsey sisters live in an unconventional world. Their parents are former flower-children who still don’t believe in rules. Their small, Northern California town is filled with free spirits and damaged souls seeking refuge from the real world. Without the anchor of authority, the three girls are adrift and have only each other to rely on.

Rachel is wild. Asha is lost. Sarah, the good sister, is the glue that holds them together. But the forces of a mysterious fate have taken Sarah’s life in a sudden and puzzling accident, sending her already fractured family into a tailspin of grief and confusion. Asha has questions. Rachel has secrets. And Sarah, waking up in the afterlife, must piece together how she got there.

Review

I didn't expect this book to be so sweet, so dark, so sad, or so unpredictable. We begin reading in Sarah's point of view. She is the sister everyone expected to be taken by cancer, but she wasn't. She is dead, however. Between the three points of view of Sarah and her sisters, we learn of her death and how everyone attempts to move on after.

This was emotional from the start. It was so easy to care about the characters, because they were unique and incredibly real. The feelings, the guilt, the hindsight - it was all there and written perfectly.

Although Sarah was "the good sister," she wasn't my favorite. I'm not sure if this is a personal thing - probably, it will vary depending on the reader of the book - but I felt so much more connected to Asha's character than the others. She was the clueless one, fitting in with the readers since neither of her sisters went into detail about what happened until late in the book. She was confused and wanted answers, until the answers became too much to bear. (Sin helped her, too. I adored him and he only came up in her point of view, so there was that.)

Something that really struck me was that, as their family fell apart, each of the sisters blamed themselves. That's how things usually are, really. When it comes down to it, we are more likley to look back on the things we could've done differently. We get more critical of ourselves than we do others. I feel like this was shown wonderfully and I really enjoyed seeing so much of the cause and effect throughout the story. In the end, it's not just one action that could have changed a situation, but the combined actions of many.

Overall, I just really loved this. If every book were so real, so heartfelt and emotional, I don't think I could ever complain.