posted on 19 Sep 2018

True Sisters by Keren David

Are blood relationships as significant as those that develop between children who are thrown together as a result of being in a foster family or through having step parents?  This interesting story explores a range of such relationships through the eyes of Clara and Ruby, two young girls who have very different family backgrounds.

The book  opens with  a  dramatic prologue which is a scene describing what it is like to be on the receiving end of a police raid as told by Clara, who lives inside the house with her mother.  But the story itself begins with a less traumatic, but nevertheless significant, drama as told by Ruby, who is waiting with the rest of her school drama group to perform in front of their families and friends. Ruby’s dad, stepmum,   half- sister and stepbrother are all sitting in the audience, but her mum hasn’t showed up and she is disappointed, but guesses that there is a good reason.

It seems that her mum is a foster carer and the reason for her absence from this important performance is Clara, who has just arrived at her new foster home after the police have taken her clearly unwell mother to hospital. Ruby is used to having to help welcome very troubled children into their family home, although this is never easy because they are often distraught, confused and angry, and Clara is no exception.  Ruby seems to be unusually mature and selfless about all this disruption and tries her best to play her part in settling Clara into her new home. Despite this she is quite worried about her coming as a new pupil to join her class at school as she is a particularly strange and unworldly creature. This is no surprise as she has been hidden away from the outside world and confined to living at home with her mother for as long as she can remember. Clara did have an older sister Anna who eventually escaped from her mother’s control and then told the relevant authorities about her sister. Because of this, Clara has been encouraged to view Anna as the ultimate betrayer, and has also been brought up to be paranoid and suspicious of everybody. Her severely limited life so far means that she has never been parted from her mother, never talked with any people outside her family, never seen a television before and  has no understanding of the world at all other than what she has seen through the window. One concession seems to have been that she was allowed to read and this has given her some second hand experiences to build upon.

There are many other layers to this unusual story.  For instance, we learn that Ruby’s older stepbrother, Adam has been bullied at school in the past because of his emerging LGBT identity.  Ruby is herself beginning to feel that she is attracted to girls and this is a difficult time for her as she doesn’t feel confident to share these feelings with any of her family or friends. At last she confides her unhappiness and confusion to Adam who encourages her to be brave and proud of her identity. This isn’t going to be easy because several of the girls at school are bitchy and judgemental.

Meanwhile, Clara begins to trust people at home and school and she and Ruby grow closer, and although they have very different personalities and interests, they are behaving almost like sisters . One day the two of them bump into Anna who has been searching for her long estranged sister and although Clara is initially hostile, together they try to be positive about helping their mother. Anna helps Ruby to understand why she needed to be sure that her sister was safe and that this was why she needed to be removed from their mother as a matter of urgency.

This is one of the many excellent short novels published by Barrington Stoke that are carefully designed to appeal to reluctant readers, so the plot moves relatively quickly. It is encouraging to see that Clara eventually settles in at her new home and begins to find her way at school with lots of support. But it is primarily a story about Ruby who has her own identity issues as well as lacking in confidence about her acting abilities. She is really desperate to gain a place at specialist drama academy along with her best friend Milly, but just can’t seem to find the right material to use at her audition. That is until Adam suggests that she uses something inspired by Clara’s traumatic experience, which turns out to be the already mentioned prologue. I thought that this was a clever way to draw the many threads of the story together and to make the point that both Ruby and Clara needed one another to move forward with their lives.  

There is much more in this story that I haven’t mentioned as I strongly recommend that you read this one for yourselves. It is ultimately all about how family and friendship are always fraught with highs and lows, no matter how settled and conventional relationships might appear to be on the surface. 

Karen Argent

September 2018