My Sister, the Serial Killer - Oyinkan Braithwaite

The first novel I ever 'listened' to and it was as easy as I was expecting it to be. Listening to a story felt familiar expect I couldn't ask questions through which I could get to the good parts quickly.

A murderous but beautiful younger sister, a long-suffering, dependable older sister, a pushy/misogynist mom and a violent, patriarchal (dead) father and of course, a handsome doctor makes this an interesting murder novel that I have read in a very long time. The killings are in the background and in the foreground at the same time as Oyinkan weaves the dysfunctionality of the family very intricately into the story. The older sister trying to hold it all together while sorting out her own issues with her family, the book was too close to home.

Loved the style of writing, it did not fit into my experience of the genre, it was dark emotionally yet not in the dark way but in a very human way - did that make sense? The characters very relatable, including the serial killer sister. I was surprised to see a vague connect being made between the killer sister's behaviour and the father's violent abuse as the same behavior propelled the other sister to save lives. Same household, same childhood - opposite reactions to the environment. Like I said, a good book.

Won't share more of the story, do read. Its fast, light and poignantly morbid.

A Nigerian author so the accent was authentic in the reading - the voices of all characters were read by one person - the jury is still out on how I feel about that. I stalk a couple of people for their book recommendations - this one was from Twinkle Khanna's collection - I check her book list quite often after this recommendation.