Sisters shares two big preoccupations with Johnson's first novel, Everything Under: free will and language. In contrast, chapters narrated by her mother Sheela have a pungent despair, heavy with fear and anger about children teachers describe as "isolated, uninterested, conjoined, young for their age, sometimes moved to great cruelty." As the girls spend their days rummaging in the old house, playing hide and seek, and coming up with new dares, Sheela burrows deeper into bed, coming out only at night when September and July are asleep. July's sentences are either elliptical or dart off unexpectedly, like a lizard from a predator. She keeps her thoughts and feelings behind glass, not sure exactly what the fear is of, "only that it is enormous." The accident is referred to only as "what happened."īook Reviews Eerie 'Fen' Is Full Of Dazzling, Hard-To-Explain Stories 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. September says put all your clothes in the bin and stand in front of the window. September says lie down under the bed for an hour. September says cut off your fingernails and put them in the milk. July, younger and shyer, does whatever September tells her: "September says do a roly-poly. When the book opens, July, September, and their mother Sheela are living by the Yorkshire coast in a "rankled, bentouttashape, dirtyallover" house "only just out of the sea." They are in exile after an unexplained accident at school: "omething happened that day at the tennis courts. "And I said no no no no but underneath the no there was a maybe. "Does September make you do things you don't want to do?" a teacher asks July of her older sister in Daisy Johnson's chilly little sliver of a novel, Sisters.
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