My Sister, My Love is Joyce Carol Oates’ creepy yet poignant interpretation of the Jon Benet Ramsey murder, as told by an older brother. The book explores the murder, and personalities of those surrounding the murder, of a competitive ice princess in the same vein as Jodi Picault’s 19 Minutes interpretively explored the Columbine High School murders.
The portraits Joyce Carol Oates paints of the mother and the father in this fictional “Rampike” family are sympathetic yet repulsive. Their characters are victims of our all-American drive for money and fame. Fame, indeed, is what they get but at what cost? In this tale they not only lose their daughter, Bliss, to the murderer – I won’t ruin the surprise ending(!)- but their moral compass which was beginning to go astray at the time of her death, ends up all over the page. The narrater, Bliss’ brother, endures a living hell throughout the book until the final pages, but essentially his life was ruined by this sister from the get-go, primarily due to the mother’s bone-crushing need to have Bliss succeed on the ice. In this story the little girl is an ice skater as opposed to a beauty queen, and resides in New Jersey rather than Colorado. But Bliss is murdered at the age of seven, just like Jon Benet, and the mother tarted her up incessantly for the media, all the while proclaiming her modesty in front of the camera. Joyce Carol Oates explores the depravity brought upon our culture via the mass media. Nothing good can come of it.
The text of the story is interspersed with “excerpts” from the narrator, Skyler’s, story within a story, in typed copy as though just found on his desk. Along with this are “handwritten” letters from “Your loving mother – Mummy”, the bane of Skyler’s existence, who is begging his forgiveness for the lack of love and begging for his involvement in her life again after the murder. These “authentic” inserts, along with Skyler’s own “footnotes” add a liveliness to the text, which is somewhat looong at 562 pages, not that any of it wasn’t riveting reading, but given the heavy tone of the novel it starts to get wearing just after midway through it. Not my favorite Joyce Carol Oates, and I am a fan, but that’s probably due to the basic premise of the plot. MAT10_09 ( )

"My Sister, My Love" is compulsively readable, but I'm sad to say that I don't think it's one of Oates's better efforts. It's book's subject, which is to say, JonBenet Ramsay and the weird, strained upper-class world she came from, that holds the reader's attention. The book is narrated from the point of view of Skyler Rampike, our fictional JonBenet's teenage older brother, and he's a fairly unlikable narrator, given to a self-deprecating sarcasm that grows wearying over five hundred or so pages. Oates pulls out all the po-mo stops, having Skyler construct the narrative before our very eyes, but this painfully self-aware approach only makes his narrative presence more intrusive. Worse, Oates's look at the Ramsay/Rampike family doesn't much get beyond cartoonish caricature: Mom's a Stepford wife, Dad's an overbearing, all-American A-type, Bliss/JonBenet is forced to be a parody of little-girl femininity. This may be, of course, a commentary on the Ramsays themselves, who were, as far as most Americans are concerned, nothing more than a series of sensationalistic news reports and creepy images, but this one-dimensional approach isn't much fun to read and keeps Oates from delving into what really drives her characters. Oates remains a gifted graphomaniac of the first order, and the book isn't without its effective, and affecting, passages, most notably her description of Skyler's teenage romance and his ultimately successful attempts to overcome his past. I'd recommend that LibraryThingers read "You Must Remember This" instead. ( )

Once I started to read this book, I wanted to continue reading. I chose this book because I have always heard about what a good writer Joyce Carol Oates is. I was not disappointed by her writing. Oates' style is beautiful, compelling. After I finished the book, however, I couldn't help but wonder what the point of it was.

Unquestionably, characters are more important than plot. Since the story was inspired by a true story, what happened is known. The book is all about how people behave and how they are affected by what happens. The story is told from the point of view of the older brother of the slain child. We see his parents through his eyes as a child (though clearly filtered through his older mind), and some of the other adults around him. We also see his sister through those same eyes. Although he does not paint her as angelic or perfect, by any means, he maintains more of the feelings for her that he had as a child -- a normal love/hate, or love/jealous/envy that siblings have. He has a lot of guilt, though nothing in the story shows that guilt to be valid. It is the guilt often felt by children who have survived a tragedy. What makes this story unsuccessful for me is that he never overcomes that guilt. In fact, it seems to grow with him. It is nothing new that such a feeling of guilt will lead one on a spiral downward.

She gives a vivid picture of the social strata and how some people see their lives only in terms of their position. Specific location was not important to the story. Such things happen anywhere. Societal position, however, was very important to the story. Posh suburbs, private schools, personal training were all part of the lifestyle of the main characters and had a lot to do with what happened from the author's point of view as I understand it. Again, none of this is new, including sacrifice of family -- even literally.

It honestly seems to me that she has merely taken a true story that has stuck in the nation's mind and tried, without knowing exactly what, to make something of it.

The book is worth reading for Oates' style and eloquence, but skip it if you're not fond of depressing for depressing's sake.

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I have read the author's website and see that this book is satirical... something I'm not particularly good at picking up on my own. After some thought I may have a new review at a later date.

My Sister, My Love, subtitled The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, is based on the murder of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey and is written from the point of view of the murder victim's elder brother. It really is a fascinating and utterly gripping read and kept my turning the pages almost compulsively. Perhaps just a tiny bit too long - in particular, I couldn't really see the point of including a short story supposedly written by the protagonist that felt like unnecessary padding, but on the whole a book that was impossible to put down and that made me rush off to buy two factual books about the Ramsey case to investigate further. ( )

At first, I didn't think I was going to like this book and then I got drawn in to the point that I had a hard time putting it down. Loosely based on the story of Jon-Benet Ramsey and written from the point of view of the overlooked older brother, the author gives us an inside look at the family dynamics of a mother living her life through her daughter, while the family falls apart. The aftermath of the murder is also explored with some interesting twists. A tragic look at what celebrity can do to a family and perhaps an indictment of a certain aspect of contemporary culture. ( )