Between Sisters

What's inside (10 sections)

1. Two Sisters, One Phone Call
2. A Gun, a Lake, and a Singer
3. A Dress, a Shower, and a Mother
4. Joe Wyatt Comes Home
5. The Headache
6. The Doctor in the Photograph
7. Where the Book Slips
8. A Year Later
9. Key takeaways
10. FAQ

The first thing Meghann Dontess does in Between Sisters is refuse to answer a question. She is forty-two, a family law attorney in Seattle, and she has spent four years on Harriet Bloom's couch without once talking about the day she left her younger sister. Hannah opens the novel in that office, with Meg studying her fingernails and making jokes, and the scene does a lot of work. Meg can take apart other people's marriages for a living, but she cannot sit still for the one story that shaped her.

Harriet calls it: Meg is using humor as a shield. Meg leaves the session early, walks through downtown, and tries to outrun the memories. That refusal is the engine of the book. Everything else, the wedding, the smart remarks, the men, the long drive to Hayden, is Meg trying to stay in motion so the past will not catch up with her.

Two Sisters, One Phone Call

Meg and Claire Cavenaugh grew up in Bakersfield with their mother, Eliana Sullivan, a minor television actress with a bad habit of choosing men and work over her daughters. Eliana had a role on a science fiction show called Starbase IV, and she treated parenting as something to do between callbacks. When she left the girls alone to make a film, Meg, then a teenager, called the one adult she could think of: Sam Cavenaugh, Claire's biological father, a man Eliana had never told about her pregnancy. Sam was shocked and then willing. He took them in at his resort in Hayden, Washington.

Claire was still a child. Meg was the older sister, angry, and convinced that Claire no longer needed her now that she had a father. After a fight with Sam, she left. She did not go home again. Meg spent time on the streets, got help from a former teacher, took the SAT, and worked her way into the University of Washington and then law school. By the time the novel opens she has a condo with a view, a divorce practice, and a habit of sleeping with younger men she meets at the Athenian, a downtown tavern. Her only close friend, Elizabeth, lives in New York. Her ex-husband, Eric, left her because she could not let him in.

Claire's life looks smaller from the outside. She flunked out of college, came back to Hayden, and stayed to help Sam run the River's Edge Resort, a campground and cabin business on sixteen acres along a river. She has never married. Her daughter, Ali, was born after Ali's father left, and Claire has built her days around the girl and the resort. She has a circle of friends, the Bluesers, Gina, Charlotte, and Karen, who have known her since school and who treat the resort as a second living room.

The sisters talk on the phone. The calls are short and a little cruel. Meg mentions her income; Claire hears condescension. Claire mentions her contentment; Meg hears a waste. Neither of them says the thing they mean, which is that they miss each other and do not know how to say so.

A Gun, a Lake, and a Singer

Before Meg can leave for Hayden, Hannah shows us what she is running from. Her client May Monroe is divorcing a man named Dale who hid money and slept with their daughter's piano teacher. May still wants the marriage. At a lunch meeting, Dale appears with a gun, calls Meg a destroyer of families, and fires. Meg steps between him and May. The bullet misses her, but not by much. She goes back to the office the same afternoon, because work is the only place she knows how to be afraid.

Her partner, Julia, has been telling her to take time off. Meg refuses until Claire calls with the news that she is marrying a man she met ten days ago.

Claire meets Bobby Jack Austin at Cowboy Bob's, a bar near Lake Chelan, where she has gone for a weekend with the Bluesers. They have been taking this trip for years, first with husbands and boyfriends, later without. This year they leave the children with a babysitter and go dancing. The headliner takes a break. Bobby picks up a guitar.

Bobby is handsome, broke, and married and divorced three times. He sings a song that seems aimed at Claire, then walks over and tells her she is the woman he has been looking for. Hannah writes the attraction as a physical fact, not a considered decision. Claire, who has spent years being careful, is not careful. Bobby proposes with a ring made of tin foil. Ali, when asked how she would feel about having him around, is delighted.

Meg hears the news and decides to drive to Hayden to talk Claire out of it. She has not met Bobby. She knows only that he is a musician with no money and a history of failed marriages, and she is certain her sister is repeating their mother's mistakes. A rescue mission gives her somewhere to put her fear.

On the way she rehearses arguments. Then she meets Bobby, watches him with Claire, and sees that the love is real, or real enough. She changes course and offers to plan the wedding. It is a funny, believable turn. Meg cannot stop managing people, so she manages the wedding instead of the marriage.

A Dress, a Shower, and a Mother

The middle of the novel is the most conventional and the most pleasurable. Meg takes Claire to a Seattle bridal boutique and buys her a Vera Wang gown, an extravagant gesture that is also an apology. She hires a wedding planner named Roy Royal. She stands in Gina's living room at the shower, overdressed and awkward, and offends Claire without quite meaning to. The sisters keep reaching for each other and grabbing the wrong thing.

Hannah is good at the logistics of a small-town wedding: the park, the chairs, the food, the relatives who have opinions. She is also good at the way an old grievance can surface in a conversation about place cards. Meg still has not forgiven Sam for throwing her out. Sam still sees a difficult teenager when he looks at her. Claire is caught between them and keeps smoothing things over, which is its own kind of anger.

Their mother is a running joke and a live wire. Eliana calls during the planning to say she cannot come; she has a hair appointment. She sends a two-seater convertible as a gift, impractical for a family with a child. Then she arrives at the church anyway, late and loud, and takes the attention she has always taken. Meg is furious. Claire is furious and also, briefly, a daughter who wants her mother to look at her.

The wedding itself goes off. Sam gives Claire his grandmother's yellow diamond ring. Meg does Claire's hair and makeup, and Claire thanks her in a way that suggests the truce might hold. The reception is held at Riverfront Park, which Meg has transformed, and for one afternoon the family looks like the family they have been pretending not to need.

Joe Wyatt Comes Home

The other strand belongs to Joe Wyatt, a forty-three-year-old former radiologist who has been drifting through the West for three years. He left Hayden after his wife, Diana, died of cancer. Diana had asked him to help her end her life, and he did. The town knows enough to whisper. Joe's sister, Gina, is Claire's closest friend, and Diana was part of the Bluesers before she got sick. Hayden is a small place. Everyone is connected to everyone, which is both the novel's warmth and its problem.

Joe comes back because he is tired of being alone. He stays with Gina, then takes a job at Smitty's Garage and a place to stay. He visits Diana's parents, Dr. Henry and his wife, and finds something he did not expect: forgiveness, or at least a door left open. He also meets Meg at the tavern after Claire's shower. They go home together. She leaves before morning. Neither of them can stop thinking about the other.

Joe's grief is the most interesting thing about him, and Hannah gives it real weight. He talks to Diana's photograph. He cannot walk into a hospital without his chest tightening. He has decided that loving anyone else would be a betrayal. Meg, who has decided that love is a bad investment, recognizes the logic. Their affair begins as a way to avoid feeling and turns into something that requires it.

There is a scene at Joe's house where Meg looks through his photographs and he tells her the truth about Diana in pieces. It is one of the few places in the book where two people simply sit with each other's damage. The novel is better when it slows down like this and worse when it hurries.

The Headache

Claire and Bobby go to Kauai for their honeymoon. Eliana, in her erratic way, arranges an audition for Bobby with a Nashville label, and the trip extends. Claire is happy, or thinks she is, until the headaches start. Then her hand tingles. Then she is at an airport with no memory of how she got there.

Meg picks her up and takes her to an emergency room. The first doctor calls it stress. Meg pushes for scans. The scans show a mass in Claire's brain, and the first diagnosis is the worst kind: inoperable, likely fatal. Claire makes Meg promise not to tell Sam, Ali, or Bobby until they know more. Meg promises, then spends nine days dragging her sister from specialist to specialist, pretending to be on a spa trip.

Nobody will operate. Radiation is the only option, and it means a month in Seattle. Claire moves into Meg's condo. Ali comes to visit and gives her mother her blanket. Bobby is in Nashville. Claire does not tell him, because she is afraid of wrecking his career, and because she has spent her life protecting people from her own needs.

This section is where the novel earns its tears. The hair falling out in clumps at a picnic. The way Meg stays up at the kitchen table researching until she cannot see straight. The way Meg, who is used to solving problems with money and force, discovers that neither works. There is a scene where Meg admits to Harriet that she is terrified of watching Claire die, and the confession lands because the book has shown us how rarely Meg admits anything.

Meg also reconnects with Elizabeth, who turns up at her condo at exactly the right moment, and with Sam, who apologizes for the way he handled her all those years ago. Sam explains that he did not know he had a daughter until Meg called him, that Eliana had disappeared on a shoot, and that he was overwhelmed by two girls he barely knew. Meg explains what she has never said aloud: she left because she felt replaced. Claire had Sam. Meg had no one.

The Doctor in the Photograph

The plot turns on a coincidence that Hannah plants early and pays off late. Meg notices a photograph in a doctor's office. Joe is in it. The man she has been sleeping with works at a garage, but he is also a radiologist who walked away from medicine after Diana's death. Meg confronts him. Joe refuses. He says he cannot go back into a hospital. Then he takes the scans anyway.

He sees an option the other doctors missed and calls a former colleague, Dr. Li Chinn, then a surgeon named Stu Weissman, who agrees to operate. The surgery is risky: paralysis, brain damage, death. Claire, who has been ready to give up, decides to live for Ali. The family gathers. Meg helps Ali say goodbye to her mother. The operation takes hours. Weissman comes out and says it went well.

A week later the doctors report that they removed the entire tumor and that it was benign. There is a chance it could return. Claire does not want to hear about chances. She wants the word gone, and she gets it.

The ending is generous. Claire goes home to Bobby and Ali. Bobby's career takes off. Meg and Joe are together, talking about a small country wedding, which is funny because Meg has spent the whole book insisting on control and prenups. The epilogue is a year later, at a concert, with the family assembled.

Where the Book Slips

The coincidence of Joe's identity is a lot to swallow. Of all the women Meg could have picked up in a Hayden tavern, she picks the one doctor who can save her sister, and he happens to be the brother of Claire's best friend and the widower of Claire's friend. Hannah prepares for it, but the preparation does not make it less convenient. The same is true of the tumor's reversal. A book that has been honest about grief and estrangement reaches for a cure that solves the emotional problem as neatly as a medical one.

The prose also has a habit of repeating what the characters feel. Meg tells us she is lonely; then the narration tells us again; then a memory tells us a third time. The middle section, with its dress fittings and shower games, could lose twenty pages without losing a single emotional beat. And Eliana is more of a device than a person. She exists to be selfish at the right moments, and the novel never quite lets her be anything else, even when it gestures at her own wounds.

What works is the specificity of the sisters' resentment. Meg carries guilt and superiority in the same breath. Claire feels abandoned and relieved, because Meg's leaving gave her Sam. Their fights are about place cards and prenups, but the old injury is audible underneath, and Hannah is content to let it stay unresolved for long stretches.

A Year Later

The last chapter is set at Bobby's concert. He dedicates a song to Claire. Ali is there, and Sam, and Joe. Meg watches her sister dance with her husband and thinks about a wedding of her own, a simple one, without a planner or a ballroom.

It is a soft landing, and the book has earned one, even if it has not entirely earned the ease of it. The epilogue asks us to believe that the hard part is over, which is a reasonable thing to want after so many hospital corridors. The detail that stays is smaller. Meg strokes her sister's head at a picnic, and a clump of hair comes away in her hand.

FAQ

What is Between Sisters about?

It follows estranged half-sisters Meghann Dontess and Claire Cavenaugh as they reunite for Claire's wedding in Washington and confront the mother who left them.

What illness does Claire have?

She is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and undergoes radiation before Joe Wyatt helps arrange surgery. The tumor turns out to be benign.

Is Between Sisters part of a series?

No. It is a standalone novel, though Meghann Dontess first appeared as a secondary character in Kristin Hannah's earlier novel Distant Shores.