I was eager to read this, having loved The Magnificent Ruins and I found there was much to enjoy. The family connections were unusual and interesting: the narrator is Mira. Her mother was separated from her father who remarried and nine years after Mira was born, had a daughter named Joy whose mother died in childbirth.
Mira, Joy and their father had a complicated connection:
The fierce love between Joy and I was rivaled only by the unspoken competition over the only parent we had ownership of, the only constant we had ever known. In Joy’s diaries, she mourned that my father denied her his innermost musings, his acute honesty and the gift of his friendship, choosing instead the safety of his older daughter’s opinions, which might have been mirrors of his own. In my opinion […] my father felt constant guilt over his own favoritism and overcompensating, paying for Joy’s student loans in full (not mine), allowing her to stay out later…
(I did go back to be sure that the text really does say “the love between Joy and I.”)
Mira became the poetry editor for a literary magazine, a job she loved that did not pay well while Joy became a high-powered attorney, having studied in London. Mira maintained close connections with a college friend Lena and her husband Sebastian and their three children. And we got to know Ulrike, the editor of Janus, who appreciates Mira’s work for the magazine, despite her inability to arrive on time or endure administrative meetings. All this to show that the characters were interestingly drawn and come alive. On one occasion, I found the turn of events to be strange and not what people do in the circumstance, but other unusual choices the author made seemed in line with the characters she has drawn.
After Joy returned from London, Mira included her in activities with her beloved, Jack, and the threesome had great times together until Joy and Jack fell in love. Mira moved to London for five years and the story begins with Mira’s return to New York. She explained to Jack the depth of her feeling about Joy: ” ‘But she took something I loved more than anything else,’ I said. ‘Joy did what she does—she saw something I had that she wanted, and she took it. She had to compete. She had to have it.’ [Poor Jack, he’s “a thing”] I felt hatred for Joy actualize inside of me, almost a relief to experience it so clearly.” Then she explained why it was not possible just to end the connection to Joy: “The desire to do her harm coupled with the fact that I could not bear her unhappiness—it had always been my undoing.”
At the end, a mystery that had been on-going was resolved in a reasonable way, and in addition a complete surprise was thrown in. I did not see that coming and now that I have had a little time to think about it, I realize that it changed everything. We readers needed that information to understand Mira’s choices. I felt blindsided. I checked with Goodreads reviewers to be sure it wasn’t just my inattention (or bad memory!) at work; others were surprised or wrote as if it didn’t happen.
Nayantara Roy, Sisters of a Halved Heart, Algonquin Books, 2026, 338 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the public library.