Gina Frangello has written a modern female counterpoint to Freud's case study of "Dora," and it is not for the timid reader. Frangello's novel, My Sister's Continent, is big, dense, complex, original and fascinating. Describing the plot hardly does justice to this book since its largest concern is what sprawls below the surface and how individuals are compromised by the past. It's all here: secrets, sex, bulimia, incest, AIDS, intimacy, and My Sister’s Continent reads like psychological mystery. Spankings, whippings, addiction, analysis, none of it handled reductively: the book is ultimately about interpretation and identity, that harrowing growth managed on the journey to wholeness (or something close to it).

Kirby is a young woman plagued by the mysterious behavior and ultimate disappearance of her twin, Kendra. The novel is framed by Kirby's attempt to figure out what exactly happened to the twins as girls as well as to reconstruct the multiple strands that lead through a web of versions, half truths, partial blindness, hearsay and parallel story lines. When Kendra vanishes, Kirby is left to make sense, decipher, and ultimately attempt some sort of reconstruction. This process is complicated with Kirby's psychiatrist's own skewed case study, her boyfriends, adult betrayals, secrets and disassociations.

This is an impressive book, for its heft and three-dimensionality, its psychological depth, its portrayal of multiple agendas. It is not the conventional cinematic vision of an American family we often see in popular literary novels, but more a stylized collage of fictionalized journals, case notes, and psychological revelations collected in deft vignettes that together build into something large and dense. Frangello is clearly interested in what is conscious and unconscious, as well as in the texture and depth of psychological issues and how they might translate to real people and their experiences.

There is much to admire here, and Frangello is smart, writes with real audacity and integrity: "The world loves a dead child, isn't that true? The dead child resides at the top of the tragedy pyramid, just above a terminally ill lover and miles away from less poetic catastrophes as physical handicaps, poverty, and rapes.” My Sister’s Continent is a disturbing and chilling plunge into the intimate. It is compelling because it encompasses the dark and the light with the complexity of true insight and its power to transform.