Our Sister's Keeper

[cornerofmadness]

Our Sister's Keeper by Jasmine Holmes

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A solid 4.5 star read for me that I rounded up because of the unique ideas in this horror novel. The first third of the book goes back and forth between two women, Marah and Thea. Marah is part of an experiment in East Cobb Mississippi in the Jim Crow era, post WWI. She and her 'sisters' are what they call Carriers. Think therapists but they literally take on the suffering of the patient and run the risk of a very early death. The experiment is run by another older African American woman, Clothilde and the father of the experiment, a white man, Dr. Grimm. What Marah and her companions can't figure out is what this white man is getting out of helping black men recover from PTSD.

That is one of the backbones of this story and yes, how and why is he doing it? Honestly we don't find out how this works other than they have injections and smelling salts that help and frankly, as a scientist, I'm rather glad Holmes didn't try to explain it. It's enough for me to know it works. There is a near mystical aspect to it and I'm okay with that. There is a paranormal aspect as well in the fact that Marah can hear/see/talk to the carriers who died.

What these carriers do is allow for East Cobb to be a successful all-Black town in the deep south. (West Cobb is its all white neighbor) There were all-Black towns back then and as the book points out in blunt detail, sometimes these towns were wiped the hell out by racists. (This takes place not long after the Tulsa Massacre where the 'Black Wall Street' was destroyed and a lot of people died). This experiment is supposed to allow East Cobb to be a utopia where this sort of violence can't happen.

We also have Thea's point of view. Thea is a wonderful character. She is a smart, educated black woman from the D.C. area traveling to East Cobb with her husband, Kid Elliot as he's supposed to become the principle of the East Cobb school. Thea is also a teacher and journalist and women's rights activist. All of which puts her at immediate odds with everyone in this town. Men and women alike adhere to the trad wife ideal. Thea will not be permitted to work at all. Her only job is to be there for her husband, maintain her house and pump out babies. Thea, needless to say, is not happy. Neither is Kid for that matter.

But what neither of them expected was for Thea to start hearing things and to start seeing terrifying hauntings of dead black women. She swears she's not losing her mind but the two local women most in her life, Mildred her neighbor and champion of the town and motherhood and Vera, the nurse, warn her about what might happen if she doesn't stop talking about what she sees, something that the men of this town cannot.

In the second third of the novel we get more points of view including Mildred, Vera, Clothilde and many of the carrier (alive and dead) which on one hand does give us more insight but on the other does slow the prose down a bit in places.

The last third's twist took me by complete surprise which is unusual so kudos for that. The reason I see this as more of a 4.5 read is the ending. It's hard to say what happened without spoiling it which I don't want to do. Let's leave it as the carriers decide to do something then something Clothilde does sort of steals their agency a bit. That said, the ending it rather cool and overall I very much enjoyed this. The casual racism, much of it now doubt inspired by real accounts, probably requires a bit of a content warning but also it felt vital to the story. Dr Grimm put me in mind of the Tuskegee experiment. If you don't know what that is, go Google it. It's something I teach all my biomedical students as it's horrific and they need to see why medical ethics exists and what happens when we devalue the lives of a group of people.

And that is the heart of this story really, people who have been told, often violently, that they are lesser, trying to find a place where they can show they are not, where they can be safe and they can be themselves. Some of them think the town's existence is worth its high price and boy is that price high. The book stands on the idea that black women are the backbone of their people, their towns, their culture and that they can bear things men cannot. In East Cobb they're definitely right about that but it's only part of the story. Read it to find out the rest. It's well worth it.



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