My Sister, the Serial Killer
“Femi makes three, you know. Three and they label you a serial killer.”
Korede is bitter. How could she not be? Her sister, Ayoola, is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola's third boyfriend in a row is dead.
Korede's practicality is the sisters' saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood, the trunk of her car is big enough for a body, and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures of her dinner to Instagram when she should be mourning her "missing" boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.
Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she's exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola's phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she's willing to go to protect her.
Sharp as nails and full of deadpan wit, Oyinkan Braithwaite's deliciously deadly debut is as fun as it is frightening.
Author: Oyinkan Braithwaite | Publisher: Doubleday Books
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Rating: 4 / 5
“I wonder what the chances are that the death of a person in the company of a serial killer would come about by chance.”
My Sister, the Serial Killer is a fast-paced, cutting, impactful little novel that comes in and gets out fast, but not without leaving its mark. I was really impressed with how Oyinkan was able to create such vivid characters and such a compelling story in so few words.
You’ll hear this book called a thriller, but it’s not quite. It reads quickly and involves murder, sure, and there’s definitely a measure of suspense (will she / won’t she kill again?), but the writing is a lot more matter-of-fact, a lot more cutting, than you’d expect from that description.
The narrator of the book is Korede, the older sister to Ayoola, a stunning, narcissistic young woman who has a nasty habit of killing her boyfriends. She calls Korede to help her clean up afterward, always claiming some sort of self-defense or innocence, confident that the world will simply bend to her will and charm (which it actually does). Korede, as her sister, is loyal to a fault, but she’s also caught in a can’t-win sort of situation.
But then Ayoola starts dating the guy Korede has pined after for months, and it begins to fracture a bit. Woven throughout the book are flashbacks to the days before their father died, years ago. He was abusive and domineering — and then he died.
The book is more about sisterhood than murder, family and duty than guilt or innocence. It’s about the privilege afforded to those who are beautiful and charming, and about the conflicts they leave in their wake.
It took me only three hours to read this book. The paperback is 225 pages with wide margins and chapter breaks every few pages. Also, she wrote it in only a few weeks?? And originally titled it Thicker than Water?? And wasn’t going to put it up for publication at all, except her agent happened to read it?? And now it was longlisted for the Women’s Prize AND the Booker Prize??? Like wow.
I’m glad I read it after having seen Oyinkan speak (I attended the paperback launch), because I was able to hear her reading it in my mind and keep everything she’d said about it in the back of my head.