Hush, Hush, Sister Dearest, Your Fall Was an Accident

By Michiko Kakutani
Published: New York Times . July 8, 2008

Imagine a mash-up of the campy 1962 chiller “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and Arnold Bennett’s 1908 novel “The Old Wives’ Tale.” Then imagine the result rewritten as a Gothic novel by an amateur lepidopterist — not a Nabokov exactly, but a novelist with a scientific bent — and you have a pretty good idea of Poppy Adams’s first novel, “The Sister.”

THE SISTER
By Poppy Adams
Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.

Though it’s flawed by a predictable and unsatisfying ending, “The Sister” is powered by the same sort of confidently rendered literary suspense that propelled Donna Tartt’s 1992 thriller, “The Secret History,” onto best-seller lists. Ms. Adams — who has worked on science documentaries for the BBC and the Discovery Channel — has used her knowledge not only to flesh out her narrator’s history as a lepidopterist but also to examine the pitfalls of obsessively logical thinking and the susceptibility of the most seemingly rational people to self-delusion.

Read the full review in The New York Times online.