Celia recommends "My Sister, the Serial Killer"

 

December 2018 Book of the Month

 

The inside cover of My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite summarizes this book as “a darkly comic, hand grenade of a novel about a Nigerian woman whose younger sister has a very inconvenient habit of killing her boyfriends.” It is indeed a hand grenade of a novel. This book is surprising, funny, intense, creepy, and addictive. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop and I’ve been thinking about this book ever since.

 

The concept is simple – Korede’s sister, Ayoola, keeps murdering her boyfriends and leaving Korede to clean up the mess. Literally. Korede has developed methods for cleaning blood stains out of just about anything. However, the relationships - those between the siblings, between Ayoola and her boyfriends, between both sisters and their mother and dead father, between Korede and the coworker she has a crush on - are deep, complex, and twisted. Although you start the book knowing who the serial killer is, how she did it, and where she dumps the bodies, there is nothing predictable about this book. As the review in Publisher’s Weekly puts it “the reveal at the end isn’t so much a ‘gotcha’ moment as the dawning of an inevitable, creeping feeling that Braithwaite expertly crafts over the course of the novel.”