Review: My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown

Fans of My Brilliant Career are in for a treat with this clever and thought provoking novel that looks at the life of beloved Australian author Miles Franklin from a different perspective. Shaped as a novel within a novel, Amy Brown tells the story of three different women. There is Ida, whose writing career has been put on hold after she finds herself forced to take the greater share of parenting and to put her husband's career first. The next section of the novel focuses on the novel that Ida is writing, an alternate version of My Brilliant Career that focuses on Franklin's sister Linda and finally, the third section focuses on Stella, a woman who is both similar and completely different from Ida who has been forced to put her own brilliant career on hold due to the pandemic. 

My Brilliant Sister is clever and innovative. Each time I picked it up, I found myself reading a few extra pages than I intended. The three protagonists are easy to identify with--in spite of the fact that my own life has been very different from each of them. Author Amy Brown has a talent for identifying experiences that are often universal among women. 

An interesting look at a beloved Australian classic.

Recommended.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia for my copy of My Brilliant Sister.

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