Dead Siblings

Mom,

I’ve thought before about putting some kind of disclaimer on this website that says No Spoiler Alert Zone – because I hate saying “spoiler alert” and I love talking about endings.  So, you and everyone should be warned that I will feel free to spoil the endings of books, starting with this post.

As I started thinking about what to say about Year of the Beasts, I realized that I was being sucked into a vortex of dead siblings.  Over the past few days I’ve read: Personal Effects by EM Kokie, My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher, The Opposite of Hallelujah by Anna Jarzab, and (reread) Year of the Beasts.  If you didn’t finish it, you don’t know that Year of the Beasts is about a dead sibling, but I actually think it reads much better if you know that, either rereading it, or just having it spoiled.  About three-quarters (maybe more) through the book, Lulu and Tessa go on an ill-advised swim in a river, and both of them are sucked under the water.  Jasper is able to save Tessa, but Lulu drowns.  What we realize when this happens is that the graphic novel portions of the book are a fantasy version of Tessa’s life after Lulu’s death, as she deals with her tremendous survivor’s guilt, made so much more painful by the fact that the sisters have been rivals throughout the summer (btw, on my reread, I noticed that Castellucci foreshadows Lulu’s death in numerous ways, the most mundane–and therefore paradoxically most heartbreaking–is one page 4: as Tessa is arguing with her mother about bringing Lulu along to the fair, she says “I’m not my sister’s keeper”–a line which takes on a tremendous resonance on a second read).