Brother & Sister Enter the Forest

October 1, 2022

In former lawyer/current TV writer Cauley's The Survivalists, perpetually single Black lawyer Aretha is laser-focused on her career until she becomes involved coffee-entrepreneur Aaron and moves in with him and his doomsday roommates, prepping for the end of the world. Mirabella's Brother & Sister Enter the Forest, whose title hints at fairytale or horror (maybe both?), is a queer coming-of-age novel about emotionally shattered Justin and his sister, Willa, who's struggling to care for him--or to leave and claim her own life. Imbued with mythic figures--the ocean-dwelling Mama Dglo, the butcher-hunting Rolling Calf--Palmer's The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter & Other Essential Ghosts plumbs the lives of two Jamaican-Trinidadian sisters in Brooklyn who find themselves at odds even as their parents' marriage becomes untethered. In Wandering Souls, London Writers Award winner Pin depicts three Vietnamese siblings struggling to survive in the UK without their parents, lost in the family's escape from Vietnam after the war (80,000-copy first printing). In Winn's In Memoriam, Henry Gaunt escapes his strong feelings for boarding-school classmate Sidney Ellwood by enlisting during World War I--but then Sidney enlists, too, and they find love amid battle.

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November 7, 2022
Mirabella debuts with the moving story of two estranged siblings whose attempt at reconnection forces them to reckon with and mend their individual wounds. Willa, a 30-something nurse, is dating a quintessential Good Guy—a farm boy turned veterinary student—but keeps him at arm’s length. In her youth, her troubled older brother, Justin, was the kind of miserable attention-getter who “the trees bowed around.” Fifteen years ago, Justin went on the lam with his lover, Nick, after Nick assaulted a homophobic bully. Perhaps unsurprisingly, their fugitive run turned violent. As well, Justin has struggled with alcoholism, and one day he arrives on Willa’s doorstep, hoping to be healed by the one person who’s looked out for him. Willa, though, is hesitant, having been the peacekeeper between Justin and their mother as a child. The relationship between Willa and Justin is by turns contentious and tender, though the shifts in their interactions sometimes feel engineered to raise the dramatic stakes. Mirabella’s plain prose, meanwhile, belies the melancholic bitterness of the characters’ strained exchanges. It’s a gripping if sometimes maudlin meditation on the difficulties of youth and the salvation that can be found in family.

March 15, 2023
Past and present collide as the reunion of an estranged brother and sister prompts a bumpy journey toward reconciliation. Willa and her older brother, Justin, never had the harmonious relationship she desired. Throughout their childhood, Willa's attempts to keep Justin out of trouble fell short; the closer she tried to get, the more quickly her brother ran toward danger. Now in her early 30s, Willa has not heard from Justin in years and has managed to create a composed and tidy life as a nurse who crafts detailed dioramas in her free time. Her calm world is troubled, though, when Justin appears on her doorstep in New Paltz, New York, one evening, bedraggled, with a bruised face and a mangled hand. Willa is hesitant to court the chaos he drags wherever he goes, but with the man she's dating present, she feels pressured to invite him in. In the weeks that follow, Justin's attempts to reconnect with Willa verge on intrusive; at one point, he tells Willa's landlady that he incurred his black eye when Willa threw a water jug at him, another of his brash displays for attention. Time shifts back and forth between the present day and Justin's coming-of-age, detailing a relationship between him and Nick, a boy three years his senior. Nick's taste for cruelty escalates the more intimate he and Justin become, trapping Justin in a vicious cycle when Nick brutally assaults a bully who has found out about them. This event creates ruptures in all aspects of Justin's life. The siblings' current-day relationship wavers between love and resentment, with Willa's disappointment in her brother increasing as he finds himself unable to reconcile the past. As profound as the circumstances straining their relationship may be, Mirabella just touches the surface of interactions that could have been afforded more nuance and subtlety. With more attention paid to actions and events than to the characters' interior lives, the novel loses many opportunities to delve into the characters' interiorities; in turn, some scenes between the siblings feel effortful in their attempts to create tension, as if relying too heavily on melodrama. A queer coming-of-age story about the vicissitudes of love and the redemption to be found in family.

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