The Bird Sisters - Domestic fiction

Author: Rebecca Rasmussen Publication Date: 2011
Number of Pages: 290
Setting: Rural Wisconsin

Time Period: Now with flashback memories to the summer of 1947

Main Characters:

• Milly – sixteen year old beauty with emerald eyes, she is a placatory and a good cook. She is in love with the son of her father’s employer.
• Twiss – the younger sister, a wild child who never wears a dress or does anything anyone tells her to do. She loves her golf pro father and under his tutelage has become proficient at golf
• Bett – the cousin from Minnesota, she is slightly older, sent for the summer to keep her out of the way as her parents go through getting a divorce. She is plain and very poor.

Plot Summary: This book tells a charming yet sober tale of two girls struggling to grow up amid family turmoil and poverty. The sisters can see that their parents have grown far apart but refuse to see the reason for it. Their father is a terrible provider in an era when that is what men did. Their mother coming from a more privileged family cannot envision the tasks that must be done to keep her family alive and well. The children try hard to bring their father in from the barn where he has gone to live.

Bett, a cousin, daughter of the mother's sister, arrives and brings with her a storm of knowledge about love, truth or consequences, and something even more devious, which threatens to cripple the family. Misunderstandings and opportunity too enticing to be turned down drive the family farther and farther apart.

Appeal: Bittersweet but good-natured, the pace is slow and character driven.

Brief quote: “Whenever her mother had been particularly unhappy in the past, she’d tell the story of how she and her aunt had given up their inheritances and married for love.

“We weren’t given what we were promised,” she’d say.

“What were you promised?” Milly would say.

“I don’t remember any more.”

Prizes or Awards: Starred review in Library Journal

Similar Works: While My Sister Sleeps by Barbara Delinsky. This is a story of a sister who lives in her older siblings shadow and the sacrifices that the relationship demands.

Reviewer's Name: Nancy Rimassa

Adapted from Saricks, Joyce G. and Nancy Brown. Readers' Advisory Service in the Public Library 2nd Edition. chicago. ALA, 1997.