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Two Sisters: A Novel
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Two Sisters: A Novel
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Two Sisters: A Novel
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Two Sisters: A Novel

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

About this ebook

Mary Hogan’s powerful and poignant debut novel about two sisters—opposites in every way—plus their mother and the secrets and lies that define them all.

One family, two sisters, a lifetime of secrets . . .

The third child in a family that wanted only two, Muriel Sullivant has always been an outsider. Short, dark-haired and round, she worships her beautiful blonde sister, Pia, and envies the close bond she shares with their mother, Lidia. Growing up in their shadow, Muriel believes that if she keeps all their secrets—and she knows plenty, outsiders always do—they will love her, too.

But that was a long time ago. Now an adult, Muriel has accepted the disappointments in her life. With her fourth-floor walk-up apartment and entry-level New York City job, she never will measure up to Pia and her wealthy husband, their daughter, and their suburban Connecticut dream home. Muriel would like nothing better than to avoid her judgmental family altogether. One thing she does quite well.

Until the day Pia shows up to visit and share devastating news that Muriel knows she cannot tell—a secret that will force her to come to terms with the past and help her see her life and her family in unexpected new ways.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateMar 4, 2014
ISBN9780062279941
Unavailable
Two Sisters: A Novel
Author

Mary Hogan

 Mary Hogan is the bestselling author of Two Sisters and the historical novel, The Woman in the Photo. Previous novels include the young adult titles, The Serious Kiss, Perfect Girl and Pretty Face (HarperCollins). Mary lives in New York City with her husband, actor Robert Hogan, and their Catahoula Leopard rescue dog, Lucy. maryhogan.com

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Reviews for Two Sisters

Rating: 3.84 out of 5 stars
4/5

25 ratings14 reviews

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I had a lot of trouble getting into this book. It just seemed incredibly plodding. When Pia comes to New York and tells her sister Muriel what is happening to her, the story takes off and I was more interested. That said, I found the plot to be predictable and pretty much standard chick lit stuff. No big deal.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was a pretty okay but kind of sad book about sisters who were never close and the youngest one of them felt unloved and unwanted by her parents and siblings her whole life. The mother was a cold, unfeeling not nice person....I think she and Joan Crawford would have been good friends. Some issues were resolved by the end but one relationship was barely touched on, that with the father. Also, there seemed to be too many product brand names mentioned, I felt like a time or two I was reading and advertisement for them...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Sisters can be the best of friends or the worst of enemies. I know because I have a sister. As complicated as the sibling relationship can be all on its own, what happens when a parent complicates it? When the older sister is clearly the favorite and the younger sister was unwanted from the start and never allowed to forget that she was superfluous to a family that already had the perfect daughter for the mother and a son for the father? Mary Hogan tackles the complicated family dynamics and sibling relationships that result in such a situation in her new novel, Two Sisters. Muriel has always been the chubby, unstylish sister lost in the golden glow of her perfect, golden, beautiful, older sister Pia. Even into adulthood, she is marginalized in her family, only noticed for her faults, real or perceived. She passively avoids dealing with the toxicity of her mother and the cold perfection of her sister by living in Manhattan on her own and making any excuse she can to stay there away from them. But when her sister calls her and insists on lunch, she can't come up with a good enough excuse to skip, and that lunch will change everything. Pia doesn't act like herself at all and, at the end of the day, she drops a bombshell on Muriel that makes Muriel reconsider her relationship with her sister, how it actually was, how she wished it had been, and how she wants it to be in the future. Alternating with Muriel's grappling with Pia's devastating secret, is the story of their parents' courtship and marriage. Lidia and Owen have never been particularly compatible in Muriel's memory and as a child she witnessed things that she shouldn't have. She has always kept her shocking secrets to herself though, despite her mother's poisonous behavior towards her and her father's complete indifference to both his daughters. The tale of Owen and Lidia's lives coming together in a whirlwind and the circumstances that led to their marriage explains a lot about their dissatisfaction, remoteness, and the separate lives they have led since Muriel was a young girl, if not about their different treatment of each of their children. This family is incredibly dysfunctional. With parents who barely acknowledge each other, a mother who actively dislikes her, an older sister who treats her hatefully, a father who is emotionally absent, and a silent older brother who passes through her life with no more substance than a shadow, it is no wonder that Muriel feels unloved and desperately craves kindness. She is vulnerable and needy but the reader can't help feeling sorry for the terrible lack in her childhood. Lidia Sullivant is reprehensible in her treatment of her youngest daughter and Pia is complicit in the ugliness. And yet Muriel is resilient enough, inherently good enough, to offer them both forgiveness, even as their behavior doesn't substantially change throughout the book nor do they show much, if any, remorse about the way that they treated her growing up. The novel's plot really hinges on Muriel's relationships with her mother and sister and the enormous secrets she carries for both of them. Her father and brother figure into the family dynamic very little and aside from making Muriel feel left out or abandoned, just as Lidia and Pia's closeness does, their impact on her in any other substantive way is negligible. It is hard to care about any of the characters besides Muriel and that makes it tough to read about the regrets Muriel carries with her. Not one of her family deserves an inch of emotion spent on them, especially not from her. Aside from Muriel, none of the characters was particularly complex or nuanced and the almost complete absence of her brother and father from the narrative felt like an oversight, even though she was as good as invisible to them, especially given a pivotal scene with her brother, the only scene with Logan, later in the book. The secrets are rather predictable and the ending is far too redemptive for the story that precedes it even as the reader roots for Muriel to be able to find the love she needs from her family. This dysfunctional drama is ultimately a quick and easy read about family, forgiveness, and the relationships we want versus the relationships we have with those closest to us.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I enjoyed the book thoroughly. The characters were real and relatable. As I read it, I felt like the author we sharing her own story. Recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The book was well written and an easy read... well kind of! The easy to read part that is. This tale of two sisters was quite hard on my heart at times, the cruelty of older siblings to the younger and the added cruelty of a mother who only wanted her first born "perfect" daughter in the first place was quite a tear jerker for me. Older sister Pia makes an unexpected visit to younger Muriel and old wounds and long hidden secrets come forth like Pandora's box. I found 80% of the book quite enjoyable and read it quickly. The parts I didn't like? The somewhat of a happy ending- in the relationships that the author discloses in this book there would not be any healing between mother and daughter. I have lived it. Sure Muriel can come to grips with her past and become free of it, but orange trees will never grow strawberries. The touches of religion were at times quite ludicrous and very one sided. One can simply not equate the the one true God of the Bible with religion of any sort and if the author would have been more open minded she would have seen that.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The story of two sisters who were never close. One was loved by their parents, the other was for the most part ignored and became the keeper of the family secrets. When a life changing event happens both women try to find a way to make their relationship better and in the process, one sister finally finds out who she really wants to be.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Mary Hogan's "Two Sisters" examines the relationship between golden-child Pia and her dowdy younger sister, Muriel. A confluence of family history and tragedy serves to crystalize the complexities of dysfunctional sisterly love, and the difficulties of relational restoration even between well-meaning individuals. The past is a heavy chain to break.I didn't particularly enjoy this story. For as modest a length as it is, it took a ridiculous amount of time to get through. I found the alternating points of view, flip-flopping chronology, flat characters, and varying verb tenses distracting and irritating. However, what did strike me about Hogan's story were the comments in her afterword in which she explains her inspiration for the book. It turns out this is a personal mediation on a lost relationship of her own, and when I take this into account, I find it hard to be quite so harsh a critic. It is one thing for an author to write about a topic for shock value simply to gain readers; it is quite another to draw readers in who might have similar experiences and say, You are not alone. Ultimately, my empathy doesn't negate the need for better editing, or the need to more fully flesh out of characters and plot. Nevertheless, I hope the author takes these critiques with a grain of salt; if writing this story helped restore her own heart and mind, then it is a worthy effort indeed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Two Sisters: A Novel is a sad and emotional tale of all the things that go wrong in a family when the two parents feel trapped and disappointed with the lives they're living.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    While I enjoyed reading Two Sisters by Mary Hogan, there was one aspect of the novel that never felt believable to me: the marriage of Muriel's parents. I had a hard time believing that they dated and wed in the 1980s considering their attitudes and beliefs about marriage itself. Without dropping any spoilers, I just want to say that their relationship would have made more sense had it been set in the 1960s instead.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Muriel Sullivant is the third child in a family of convenience. The child who was a mistake. Throughout her life Muriel has watched as her older sister Pia, the perfect one, has been everything her mother ever wanted and as her brother Logan has been everything their father ever wanted. Muriel was pretty much left to raise herself, never truly feeling loved or wanted. The few times she felt loved or wanted she would later find out that she was being used to further whatever the person giving her the attention needed her for. Regularly she was bullied and belittled by her sister and mother and ignored by her father and brother. She was threatened into keeping secrets and then blamed whenever anything went wrong, whether she was involved or not. The family had serious dysfunction issues. As Muriel grew into an adult, bearing the weight of never being enough, unloved, carrying many family secrets she wondered why no one loved her, what had she done? One day her sister Pia came to visit and the world they knew would never be the same again. Old secrets and situations would be discussed, new secrets would surface. Adult sisters would finally come together.As sisters finally became sisters and relationships were put on the fast track to healing Muriel would find out after all of these years why she was treated the way she was and how none of it was ever her fault. I found this book to be very emotional and hard to begin. The first section was the hardest because it was written in several time frames. If the author had made each chapter a different time frame, I think I would have had an easier time. But not knowing from one paragraph to the next if I was going to be in Muriels' past or present, or her parents past or present made it hard to follow at first. I understood that the author was trying to show history in relationships but I felt it was a little erratic. I did find that there was enough within the first section to peak my curiosity and make me want to continue reading. Once I made it to Section II it became smoother in the transitions which made for a much more enjoyable read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I found this book to be a quick but uneventful read. Hogan tells the story of a dysfunctional family through the eyes of an adult Muriel (the youngest child) reflecting back on events of her childhood. The past is interspersed with present sad family events, and ultimately reveals 'secrets' that I thought were pretty obvious from early on in the narrative. I was also disappointed by the quick and neat wrap-up at the end of the novel - I'm all for the idea of family forgiveness, and of giving people a second (or thirtieth) chance, but Muriel's struggles throughout the book are trivialized at the end.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I had to force myself to keep reading this book because I had committed to doing an early review. Overall, the story line was an interesting, if tragic, view of a dysfunctional family from the viewpoint of the youngest daughter. However, the character and relationship development was almost non-existent! You are told about series of events, but you never really got a feel for 'who' anyone was, what they were thinking, how they felt about things. The 'romance' of Owen and Lidia was cut and dried. Pia's relationship with her husband was initially portrayed as rather cold, then suddenly warm? You did feel Pia's distress at what she was going thru, but you never saw how she evolved from the mean sister to a briefly caring sister....what happened in the in between years? And was she even sincere? And the brother's character was almost non existent save for a few lines..... and you never got a feel for if Muriel would stay connected with him. That could have been developed more. You never quite get a feel about who Lidia is, from the time she meets Owen, and even to the end of the story. Yes she shows some remorse, but you pretty much disliked her for how she treated her family. Owen's feeling are briefly displayed as he meets Lidia, but after that, he is only a background figure. There was way too much description of meaningless details...about clothing, the city and landscape, rooms, and on and on until i found myself skimming to find a point of some actual story line!! Also, the figurative language & metaphors about drove me nuts! Examples: 'branches resembling Brussels sprouts'... 'squinting like a newborn in morning sunlight'.....'her shoulders melted into 2 parentheses'....'His mind flashed platitudes like a flip book'.....'His tongue felt like a soggy loaf of bread'......'as if a rabble of monarch butterflies had just done a flyby'.......'like the Tin Man creaking down the yellow brick road'....'toes fanned out the hood on a frill-necked lizard'.......'like it was the infant son of Christ'.....'like one of those shrink wrapped turkey legs they sell at Price Right'......'like a melted Creamsicle'.......'Owen was as tiny limbed as a t-rex'...... 'her big toe stuck out of her peep-toe pumps like an unpedicured bratwurst'.....'satin dresses that rippled across the stage like cake icing'.....'Hudson river flickered in the afternoon sunlight like a new box of tinsel' ...'flickered past like a flip book'.....'Like a giant polka, people automatically sidestepped each other'.....'Muriel let her face hang there like bolt of sateen.'......'her mother's lips stiffen into a twig'....'they moved as fluidly as seahorses in the ocean'.....'in the clear Connecticut sunlight it glowed like a retouched photo'.....'a giant island sat in the center like a square spaceship'....'the hollows of her cheeks could house a stack of teabags'.....'The 96th st subway station arched into the gray sky like a Star Wars storm trooper helmet'......'her lips parted as if a stranger had walked up and yanked her hair'...... I could pull out a couple dozen more such examples of poor writing here, but won't! How these got past an editor, I have to wonder. They sound very 'Jr High' ish!! Too 'cutesy' for any serious writer! Over and over these distracting phrases keep coming, ad nauseam, and add nothing to the story, but they are so annoying! This was rather a tedious book to read.....but could have been a great story is there had just been more development of the characters, and more their relationships, and less detail to scenery, and cut the metaphors OUT!!! I have rarely read a book in which I felt more detached from the characters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Two Sisters is a story about a dysfunctional family and the affects it had on the children. It is told by the main character, Muriel. Muriel is the third born child in her family and was overlooked by her parents. The story starts with Muriel in the present day and flashes back to her troubled childhood and the flawed relationship she had with her family. Secrets are kept throughout Muriel's childhood and revealed as the story unfolds.For the most part this was a very sad story. Muriel's mother Lydia was a wicked woman and her behavior disrupted the lives of all of the family members. I would recommend this book. I was touched by the author's explanation at the very end about how she developed the idea for this story.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Not good but some interesting parts. Very predictable. Really.