Poppy Adams' The Sister is a strange but satisfying book. The original British title, The Behaviour of Moths, is a much more pertinent title but I guess it's too stuffy for American readers so we get the vague title instead. Ginny is a seventy year old woman who is still in the house she grew up in, the house where she and her father worked together as lepidopterists -- moth specialists. Her younger sister Vivi is returning to the house after 50 years and Ginny is not sure how she feels about it. Over the course of a five day narration, Ginny tells us not only about her current feelings but all about their family history and the things she has experienced in her life.

The book has many twists as Ginny reveals things about past and present that we would not have guessed from her narration. We learn fairly early that Ginny is not a "normal" person -- detached, unemotional and a bit odd. It is this that makes you wonder if you can take her storytelling at face value or if we are hearing everything through a skewed perspective. This is a very interesting read from a non-standard point of view.

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I give "The Sister" by Poppy Adams 3 Stars. It had a slow start that almost made me want to put it down but I kept reading and got pulled in by the story. It not only showed the dynamics of family life, the relationship of sisters but also how things may or may not change after years of separation. I thought some of it was a little too technical to read for enjoyment, unless you're interested in Moths but over all, a good read.

This is a book that I was really excited about and had great hopes for but ultimately I was disappointed. Part of me wonders if this was because I missed something along the way or the "unreliable" narrator misled me. It could also have been that I read this book on vacation and kept picking it up and putting it down and may have lost my train of thought. Ultimately, I was confused about what actually happened in the book, which left me dissatisfied. The story is narrated by Ginny, who lives alone in the huge, crumbling family mansion. She is waiting for her little sister Vivi to return home after years away. The book alternates between Ginny's present day and the childhood that she and Vivi shared -- a childhood that was a bit unorthodox to say the least. The book covers the reunion of the sisters and fills you in on the circumstances that kept them apart for more than 50 years. As I said, with Ginny as the narrator, you are privy only to her thoughts and feelings, which eventually led me to become mistrustful of what she said. Although I understood what happens at the end, I became confused about what happened in the middle. I felt that this book had a lot of potential but ultimately it didn't satisfy me. If you are a fan of gothic mysteries, this might be a good fit for you. But be warned, the book includes a lot of information about moths -- probably more than you really want to know. ( )

Short-listed for the 2008 Costa Award (formerly Whitbread Award), it brings to mind the first sentence of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina - "All happy families are like one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". In the 21st century we might say that each dysfunctional family is dysfunctional in its own way, for the Stone family is truely dysfunctional.

At first I felt that Ginny, the narrator, was just a little eccentric, but that proves to be an understatement. I was a little disappointed that we did not get to hear much of Vivi's side of the story. But it was a captivating read. I'm looking forward to more by this author.

The original title of this book was "The Behaviour of Moths", and was changed for the U.S. market. I think I learned a little more about moths than I really wanted to know. ( )

This is the story of two elderly sister reunited after an absence of fifty years. One of the sisters Ginny is the narrator. The book takes place over only a few days but through Ginny, and her memories, and her conversations with her sister we are able to piece together a lot of what has happened over the last fifty years. Viv left home at a young age and has hardly been back. Ginny, who became a famous lepidoperist like her father, still lives in the same house but over time she has become more and more reclusive barley venturing out. Her life has become more and more controlled by routine to the point of obsessiveness, so she finds it very difficult when Viv decides to return home to live with her sister. She feels suspicious of her sister's motives for returning. As the sisters come together we learn about their childhood and their past, and the sudden mysterious death of their mother, following her decline into alcoholism. We soon realise that the sisters see the events of their lives in very different ways and that Ginny cannot necessarily be trusted to tell the truth. The book comes to a somewhat shocking conclusion which still left me with some frustration as i did not get answers to all my questions. The other down side for me was all the information about moths which some may have found interesting but I skipped over mostly. It seemed to me to disrupt the flow of the book at times. However I still felt it was worth the read. ( )