Listen To Your Sister by Neena Viel

Book Review

Melody Bowles

I wanted to read this one because it had an intriguing title. People should listen to their sisters! I also haven’t read many books focused on sibling relationships and thought the premise sounded interesting.

Calla has become the legal guardian of Jamie and it’s driving her insane. He’s dealing drugs at school, staying out all night partying, hitting girls and in general getting up to no good. The book describes this as ‘Jamie sh**’, as if it’s endearing, normal teenage boy stuff. Their middle sibling Dre offers an occasional hand, but quite sensibly wants to limit Jamie’s incursion on his life. Meanwhile Calla spends every night tormented by a Nightmare (the book always capitalises it) in which both boys are graphically and hideously murdered.

My sympathies are firmly with Calla. The book goes to great pains to illustrate the sacrifices she’s made at every point of her life – of both her physical and financial safety – in order to try and keep her idiot brothers safe. Unfortunately this takes the wind out of the story for me. When her Nightmare becomes real, I never feared for Jamie and Dre. She is so clearly and utterly a complete doormat for them that I knew they’d get out. The whole spiel went on far too long. Even the unending knife/gun violence and non-stop mentions of dog/baby/human excrement became boring.

I think the author wanted to build sympathy for the characters through their shared traumatic childhood and abusive, neglectful parents. For me, it isn’t enough to have all the sympathetic parts in the back story. I really needed a reason to root for Jamie and Dre in the present to get invested in the story of their relationship. The moment they tried to shut Calla in a wardrobe ‘for her own protection’ was the end of the line for me in terms of trying to like them.

This book wasn’t for me. But if you like gritty, character-driven, grotesque, hallucinatory horror it might be for you.