Our Sometime Sister
Reviews

"An intelligent, original, complex, sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing novel. Ms. Labiner has a lot of things going for her as a fiction writer and one thing is that she rarely makes a false or wrong move. She takes an old theme, writing a novel and the novel inside the novel, and turns it upside down besides making it new. A bold start and a bright future."
-Stephen Dixon

"To finish her complex and subtle first novel, Our Sometime Sister, Norah Labiner tucked herself away in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. 'The snow was falling, I was alone in a friend's cabin, and there was this Jack London feeling,' she recalls. 'It was great and it was horrible. I had no excuse not to do the writing.' This combination of pioneer spirit and aloneness with the self can be found all the way through the novel, which combines lively storytelling with Labiner's unique skill at conveying psychological depth.

"Half of Our Sometime Sister is the tale of Pearl Christomo, a bright, unhappy teenager whose divorced mother is engaged to a smarmy, vaguely sinister personal- growth guru. Pearl is still fiercely loyal to her scholarly father, a professor of history, and fights a guerrilla war against her new fake father. Eventually, the adamant Pearl is packed off to an exclusive school, where she begins a long struggle to find herself as a writer.

"It may seem like a standard-model coming-of-age story, but the 31-year-old Labiner, who labored on the novel for nearly 10 years, while studying at the University of Michigan and the University of Minne-sota, had something richer and stranger in mind from the beginning. Pearl is a novelist, and interspersed between chapters of the main story, we hear the voices of the fictional characters Pearl is creating. . . . It's soon clear that all these figures reflect different aspects of Pearl's imagination and yearning.

" 'This is not a story with a standard buildup and 'climax.' 'I think of that way of writing as a masculine paradigm,' Labiner says. 'I try to let my writing just swirl and swirl around a center.' Equally important to her is the deft mix of cultural references, from old TV shows to Shakespeare's Hamlet. 'Someone once asked me how I claimed the right to use Shakespeare in my book,' says Labiner, who lives in Minneapolis. 'Well, I just like Shakespeare. He's the ultimate entertainment text, with something for everybody. And high and low culture mix in everybody's lives. Shakespeare and Harlequin romances draw on the same themes, and I'm going to draw on them too, to tell the story I want to tell.' "
-Utne Reader,
November-December 1998

"The most remarkable aspect of Labiner's first novel is how absorbing it is despite its hyper-literary soul and its use of the device of a novel within a novel. Now 25, Pearl Christomo explains how she expanded a novella she had written at age 19 by reluctantly incorporating details of her own life. Labiner's novel consists of Pearl's new, autobiographical chapters and the original novella, about suburban angst during the 1970s and '80s. Literary references abound, but Labiner manages them wisely. It is Hamlet (from which the title is drawn) that Labiner uses most liberally to illuminate the question of female identity: one girl wonders why her teacher won't discuss Ophelia's tragic flaw; another asks, 'What's so great about another man who can't make up his mind?' Pearl's story involves a usurping stepfather who drives a wedge between her and her mother. Exiled from her suburban Michigan Elsinore to boarding school, Pearl begins writing and falls under the spell of Hugo Tappan, a seedy writer-in-residence. The two stories- Pearl's novel and Pearl's life-gradually interweave (Hugo is doppelgangered as Hugh Denmark in Pearl's novel), forming a shifting picture of who Pearl is-or could be. Pearl confesses from the start that she has little faith in plot or strict chronology. She believes that a novel is formed out of 'rags and scraps and forgotten things.' In less capable hands, this could all have been too precious. But Labiner, narrating in several distinct and haunting voices, proves herself a metafictional adept. She succeeds in crafting an ambitious, poignant, and sharp tongued novel filled with secrets and ghosts, jealousy and love."
-Publishers Weekly,
February 23, 1998

"In her remarkable first novel, Minneapolis resident Norah Labiner weaves a complex story of love, maternal bonds, secrets and ghosts. It is the story of Pearl Christomo, who chooses a sort of exile in a boarding school in the Michigan wilderness over conforming to the expectations of her new stepfather. With guidance from Hugh Tappan, the tippler-slash-writer for whom she cleans house, Pearl begins to write a story of not-so-perfect couples, scorned poets and actresses. As a novella within the novel, Pearl's story is revealed to the reader at the same rate that Pearl's actual life is exposed. Labiner's novel explores the process of writing and how the author's life affects the work she creates. Eventually Pearl's story and her life begin to merge, and the result is absorbing both to Pearl and to the reader.

"The novel is infused with wit, usually sharp and wry, as when she discusses Hamlet, 'Wasn't I just trapped with my mother and stepfather as Hamlet had been? And who could say, hidden behind those walls, whether Hamlet was mad or not? Who could say it wasn't just the time of the month, the pollen count, his thwarted desire, something in his genes, a new pair of boots that pinched his toes, his blood; who could say whether he was mad all the time or only when he ran out of his medication?'

"Most astonishing is how Labiner is able to juggle with such grace the many voices in the story, for Pearl's novella within the novel is told in turn by all the characters present. These characters expound on the tragedy of love with vibrant descriptions and affecting honesty. Through it we gain insight into Pearl, for as she says, her novella is told using scraps and bits from her own life and paints a delicate picture of womanhood and love.

"It is surprising that Labiner's first novel is so complex. Not only is there a broad range of characters but also a unique voice that goes with each, and Labiner orchestrates them all through Pearl with great skill. At over 400 pages, it is both grandiose and successful. Labiner explores the boundaries of fiction with her unique use of the novel within a novel, and it will be interesting to see how Labiner continues to stretch the boundaries of fiction in her future work."
-Push,
Jason Weidemann,
April 1998

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