The Almost Sisters

The Almost Sisters is Joshilyn Jackson’s 2017 novel, set primarily in the small Alabama town of Birchville and weaving together a contemporary southern family drama with the long shadow of southern history. The narrator, Leia Birch Briggs, is a successful comic book artist living in Norfolk, Virginia, with her demanding, eccentric, white liberal family back home in Alabama. Leia is now pregnant after a one night stand with a man she met at a comic convention, and she has not yet told her family what she has been carrying for months.

The novel opens when several crises hit at once. Leia’s stepsister Rachel’s marriage is collapsing in Norfolk. Their grandmother Birchie, the matriarch of the family back in Alabama, is showing signs of serious dementia and has been hiding it from everyone. And the news that the man Leia slept with was Black, and that the baby will therefore be biracial, is a complication for Leia’s family in ways that white southerners of liberal good intentions have not always wanted to admit. The novel sends Leia back to Birchville to handle the emergency with her grandmother, and the trip becomes a confrontation with everything the family has been refusing to talk about for generations.

Joshilyn Jackson is one of the strongest contemporary voices in southern fiction, and The Almost Sisters shows her at the height of her powers. The Birchville setting is rendered with the kind of specificity that only an actual southern writer who knows these places produces. The family dynamics, with all their love and all their failures, are handled without either sentimentality or easy condemnation. And the discovery in the attic, which is the central plot mechanism that drives Leia toward her reckoning with the family’s hidden history, is treated with the seriousness the material demands.

For longtime Joshilyn Jackson fans, The Almost Sisters is one of her most accomplished novels. For new readers, it is a strong introduction to her work and a southern novel that takes its difficult subjects head on.