A SISTER AGO

A woman searches for answers about the sudden death of her sister in Buhr’s family drama.

A year after the death of her sister, Rachel, from an overdose, Christine Lange receives a surprise phone call from a woman named Keji Nakayama. Walter Anderson, a therapist Christine saw a few times before her sister’s death, has been talking about her and gave Keji, another one of his patients, Christine’s number. When the two women meet, Christine learns that Keji’s brother, Yota, also recently overdosed, that he knew Rachel, and that they both knew Walter. Though Christine has spent the past year hiding from her grief by burying herself in her work for a Seattle nonprofit organization, now she’s determined to find answers about the end of Rachel’s life. Along the way, she becomes close friends with Keji and finally starts to heal. The framing of the story is a bit misleading—the opening seems to set up a mystery surrounding the events leading to Rachel’s death, with Walter as a potential villain. Yet Rachel’s death turns out to be not very mysterious at all, and Walter’s impact on the plot is much smaller than initially implied. The timeline jumps around, from Christine’s childhood to her adolescence to her adulthood, but the skips are never confusing. The story comes together in a collage of grief that is achingly and intimately drawn: “That comment stung…What Christine had only just realized one day previously when her dad said the words, ‘Your sister’s gone,’ Rachel had known well enough to share with her AA sponsor. They weren’t close.” The characters are all fully realized, especially Rachel, though the sections from her point of view feel a bit extraneous. While Christine’s journey to find her sister might have been more powerful if readers didn’t have the information that she’s missing, this quietly painful story of loss is not one to miss.

A heart-rending character study.