The Almost Sisters

A General Fiction Novel by Joshilyn Jackson

Subgenres:

Southern Fiction,
Family Secrets,
Family Drama

Published 2017

Length 357 pages

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This book is for you if you're into...

Southern family dramas with secrets buried in old houses
Graphic novelists navigating real life messes and unexpected motherhood
Multi-generational women facing hard truths and complicated loyalties

From Little Stack

Family secrets grow thick in this Southern novel from Joshilyn Jackson. Leia returns home to Alabama with a secret in tow: she’s pregnant after a one-night stand with a Batman at a comics convention. But more secrets await her, including her sister Rachel’s troubled marriage, the dementia her grandmother Birchie has been concealing, and a much-older secret waiting in Birchie’s attic.

I loved all the layers—including a shocking revelation at the end—not to mention the evocative Southern setting and these women’s warm but complicated relationships.

As Featured in 6 Captivating Novels with Shocking Secrets by Gg Andrew

Publisher Description

With empathy, grace, humor, and piercing insight, the author of gods in Alabama pens a powerful, emotionally resonant novel of the South that confronts the truth about privilege, family, and the distinctions between perception and reality—the stories we tell ourselves about our origins and who we really are.

Superheroes have always been Leia Birch Briggs" weakness. One tequila-soaked night at a comics convention, the usually level-headed graphic novelist is swept off her barstool by a handsome and anonymous Batman. It turns out the caped crusader has left her with more than just a nice, fuzzy memory. She's having a baby boy—an unexpected but not unhappy development in the thirty-eight year-old's life.

But before Leia can break the news of her impending single-motherhood (including the fact that her baby is biracial) to her conventional, Southern family, her step-sister Rachel's marriage implodes. Worse, she learns her beloved ninety-year-old grandmother, Birchie, is losing her mind, and she's been hiding her dementia with the help of Wattie, her best friend since girlhood.

Leia returns to Alabama to put her grandmother's affairs in order, clean out the big Victorian that has been in the Birch family for generations, and tell her family that she's pregnant. Yet just when Leia thinks she's got it all under control, she learns that illness is not the only thing Birchie's been hiding. Tucked in the attic is a dangerous secret with roots that reach all the way back to the Civil War. Its exposure threatens the family's freedom and future, and it will change everything about how Leia sees herself and her sister, her son and his missing father, and the world she thinks she knows.

with Joshilyn Jackson

“ I call (my writing), “Weirdo Fiction with a Shot of Southern Gothic Influence for Smart People Who Can Catch the Nuances but Who Like Narrative Drive, and Who Have a Sense of Humor but Who Are Willing to Go Down to Dark Places.” ”