Daisy Johnson’s new novel, “Sisters,” starts with a journey that ends at a house in the middle of nowhere. Jonathan Cape, 192pp, £14.99. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Read the full review here: Sisters by Daisy Johnson review – a confection of horror tropes rendered in poetic prose---(3.5) In Daisy Johnson's second novel, two sisters and their mother come to live in a creaky house on the coastal edge of the North York Moors.
September and July are best friends as well as sisters; born less than a year apart, one is almost never without the other. Sisters by Daisy Johnson Published by Johnathan Cape Available from all Good Bookshops and Online What They Say Something unspeakable has happened to sisters July and September.
They hardly see anyone else, apart from a broadband engineer and a boy on the beach, and this seems to suit them, until it doesn’t. And what she means, of course, is if we hadn’t been born. “She was rebelling against herself, refusing her meaningful living, and the house was doing the same.”.
If July feels her own signal is weak, September’s is strong and insistent. In it, Johnson shows how the Oedipus myth, too, hinges on the unreliability of words, or at least of the things behind them. Sheela, a children’s writer, has driven from Oxford to the eastern edge of the North York Moors with her teenage daughters, September and July, our narrator for much of the book, in the back seat.
Johnson’s stories contain minimal dialogue and very little straightforward narration. July's sentences are either elliptical or dart off unexpectedly, like a lizard from a predator. Daisy Johnson (Chloe Bennet), still an agent, ended up going on missions in space. Warning: Spoiler alert! By continuing to use this website, you consent to our use of these cookies. The way families become little nations, with loyalties, alliances, infighting, sometimes shared languages. “Sometimes I think I can remember the days when we were so small we slept in one cot, four hands twisting above our heads, seeing the world from exactly the same viewpoint,” July – who narrates the majority of the novel – tells us. After Sarah goes missing, Gretel becomes a lexicographer, someone whose job it is to track words, describe and contain them, demarcate their outer edges. “Yes. September says lie down under the bed for an hour. They have no friends, and are closer than ever – but it is a clammy, airless closeness, one that often leaves July confused about where September ends and she begins. Johnson’s insight is to understand the irresistible pull of an all-consuming relationship; the thrill of a feverish, girlish collapse of boundaries. Put this needle through your finger. This is worse.” From time to time the reader is shown things as Sheela sees them, and her haunted testimony does not always tally with July’s account. Daisy Johnson’s Sisters is a short, atmospheric horror novel full of strange sentences, claustrophobic rooms and distorted, converging bodies. Her sentences are alert to texture, sound and smell, as well as physiological sensations harder to name: the “bite of almost fear in my temples”, the “numb buzz of realisation”. The new house is “rankled, bentoutashape, dirtyallover” – the outside surrounded by plastic bags and broken plant pots, the inside coated in dirt and dead flies. Season 7 of Agents of SHIELD introduced a brand new Inhuman named Kora, who is revealed to be Daisy Johnson's secret older sister. Cut off all your hair. Desperate for a fresh start, their mother Sheela moves them across the country to an old family house that has a troubled life of its own. “I can feel all the rooms behind me,” July thinks. “Through the palm of September’s hand I think I could probably hear the slow motion of her thoughts if I listened well enough,” July thinks. At a party, she sees her sister through the eyes of strangers, holding their image of September alongside her own special understanding of her.
It’s spring and the sun is shining; the sea is just over the fields. The sisters’ relationship seems increasingly uncomfortable. They are fleeing a traumatic event that took place between the sisters and a group of other schoolgirls in March, that is only vaguely alluded to (“It had been September’s idea to get those girls to the old tennis court, to teach them a lesson, to scare them a bit”).
At the same time there’s a fair amount of energetic foreshadowing going on, a sense that (oh, God) we are barreling toward something even worse, some appalling, revelatory climax.
“It’s often difficult to identify which sister she’s talking about, and many strange sentences conjure in the reader’s mind an image of a mythical creature with ten legs and five heads, lying in bed eating junk food.”. This novel by young writer Daisy Johnson, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize with her debut Everything Under, is not what it seems at first glance. I think then as I have so many times, she is the person I have always wanted to be. ", July's skittering, anxious narration is an exercise in avoidance, in selective memory, in keeping the horror in peripheral vision: not so far that it is out of sight, not so near that you can see its contours. The novel will also seem familiar to readers of Johnson’s other work. Review: 'Sisters,' By Daisy Johnson Johnson's chilly, uneasy novel follows two sisters in the wake of an unnamed "something" that happened. “She has been sad before but it was not the same as this. Johnson has cultivated a striking style with recurring images and themes: uncanny, watery landscapes; homes that turn against their inhabitants; animalistic characters with intense, almost incestuous family bonds; private, primitive languages; bodies that bloat and transform.
So the narrative keeps circling back to past events, building up a powerful atmosphere of doom and dread in a manner that occasionally feels a little overwrought — as if nothing bad has been left unimagined. “It is impossible to face every part of the house at once.” Ironically named “The Settle House”, this is a restless, unsettling and lonely place.
Cut off all your hair.
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