Review: My Sister Rosa by Justine Larbalestier

Nature versus nurture is the question at the very heart of My Sister Rosa. Che Taylor is seventeen years old, and has his hands full with his ten year old sister, Rosa. Rosa is clever, talented, sweet on the surface and, Che is very certain, a dangerous psychopath. Fortunately, Rosa hasn't harmed anyone physically ... yet. And Che is doing his best to stop her, in spite of the fact that no one, not even their parents, will believe him about Rosa's true nature. On top of that, he's trying to live like a normal teenager which isn't easy in itself when he's an Australian kid who has spent most of his adolescence travelling the globe and he's just landed in New York--a city that is about as different from Sydney as you can get.

This was an interesting, and oh so creepy read, about a young man trapped in a nightmarish situation. Throw in a pair of negligent parents in there, and you're left with a book that is unsettling. The author portrays Rosa as a cold and calculating villain, who plays on all of Che's worst fears for kicks. Meanwhile, key details about Che--and their parents--are cleverly hidden in the narrative, though I felt that some of these details were hidden for a bit too long. 

The novel also raises an important question about the differences between Che and Rosa, even though, perhaps, they're not so different genetically. What is it that makes one child from the same family evil, while the other is not? 

Ultimately, My Sister Rosa is a compelling read about a young man faced with a near impossible situation. There are a number of twists and turns along the way that kept me hooked. While the subject matter is quite dark, it also raises some important questions and while ultimately reassuring the reader that people are not shaped by biology alone. 

This book was read for the Aussie Author Reading Challenge 2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more