Sister is a novella available from Summer Camp Publishing.
Sister traces its protagonist’s life through three significant eras and attempts to offer a sensitive and considered answer to the question: how do you build a family out of the wreckage of your youthful indiscretions? The book is set in rural, southeastern Ohio, and covers a span of more than twenty years; it’s both a portrait of a marriage and a portrait of a woman attempting to do her best with the hand that life has dealt her. Learn more about the Sister in this quick video.
praise for Sister
“This! This is the human experience. Strickley’s Sister drives hard into the collapse and expansion of life. We trade and bargain and compromise, holding onto the strings of our possibilities with both hands, grasping for familiarity while seeking new comforts—all while the walls close in. The vortex is beautiful in its complications.” —C.H. Hooks Author of Alligator Zoo-Park Magic
“With piercing intensity, Sarah Anne Strickley unfolds this dark Ohio fairy tale about a family with a not-so-secret rift at its center. As five lives entwine in the knot of a small college town, you suddenly feel the lump of recognition rise in your own throat. You know this family, their histories, and the too-easy ways we all keep from truly seeing each other. By witnessing, in searing prose, to the deep humanity of her characters, Strickley shows how grief and desire are two pulses in the same heartbeat. Her cadences pull us closer to grace.” —Kiki Petrosino Author of White Blood
“A novella of love and redemption that hits both the head and the heart, written in Strickley’s signature pitch-perfect prose. Read this story. Read this story because it is just so fucking good.” —Eric Freeze Author of Invisible Men
“Sarah Anne Strickley’s gorgeously rendered characters catch hold of us and break our hearts. Her voice is irresistible, infused with an unexpected mixture of toughness and warmth. Sister is a splendid novella you won’t want to end.” —David Philip Mullins Author of The Brightest Place in the World
“Sentence by sentence, Sarah Anne Strickley’s gorgeous and gritty novella proves she’s a prose stylist unsurpassed. Sister is an unflinching and honest portrayal of place and character and the effects of place on character—a Winesburg, Ohio for the new now. Read this book yesterday!” —Ryan Ridge Author of New Bad News
"I’m hard-pressed to recall a character I’ve ever rooted for harder than Sarah Anne Strickley’s Sister, the heartbeat and protagonist of her novella of the same name. Frank, wise, and unabashedly feminist, Strickley’s portrait of a complicated marriage brims with tenderness and nuance. From high school to hospice, Sister is a beautiful, bruising, intimate work, equal parts hilarious and gutting." —Tracy Manister Alifanz Author of The Done Thing