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No one will love you or hurt you more than a sister. "I love this book. It moves like a souped-up pickup truck." -- Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and A Book of Days From Betsy Lerner, celebrated author of The Bridge Ladies, comes a wry and riveting debut novel about family, mental illness, and a hard-won path between two sisters It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight, but when her stunning confidence morphs into something erratic and unpredictable, she becomes a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Put simply, she has no brakes. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, survives Ollie's bullying and outcast status throughout her school years. She dreams of winning a Nobel Prize and unlocking the mysteries of the mind. Amy believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. Except none of that can explain what's happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the bipolar disorder that will shatter Amy's carefully constructed world. As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place--first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships--every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. For all that upends and unsettles these sisters, an inextricable bond always draws them back. Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of sisterhood, mental health, loss and love. If anything is true it's what Amy learns on her road to self-acceptance: No one will love you or hurt you more than a sister.
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As an aging Baby Boomer, I'm impressed that Betsy Lerner, a well-regarded literary agent and editor, has written her first novel at age 64. I'm less impressed by the novel itself. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but there is little to distinguish Shred Sisters from the hundreds of other stories that explore the dynamics between two sisters (subset: one of them has a serious mental illness). And despite reviews that describe the book as both funny and poignant, I couldn't find the alleged humor. YMMV if you need to read all of the books to remind yourself that “nobody will love you or hurt you more than a sister.”