Is there any better way to close out one year and begin another than by crying hysterically over characters in a fictional book?

No. I can’t think of one.

The Good Sister has just set the mood for every other book I will read in 2016. I was pretty late to the party for this one, but I’m forever grateful I gave it a chance.

Sarah. Rachel. Asha.
3 sisters more alike than they’d probably care to admit.
2 of them consumed with guilt in very different ways, and the other hopelessly lost in a sea of grief.
Each of them there for each other in a way that only siblings can be.
An emotional roller coaster of a novel.

I loved the small town California setting. The little hippie village. The beach and the forest. I loved Sin and Krishna and the girls’ dad. I hated the mother.

I got caught up in the hauntingly lyrical writing and Sarah’s heartbreaking poems from the afterlife.

Oh, god, I cried. I wept and blubbered all over this beautiful paperback. These 2 young girls just lost a vital part of their life and now they’re attempting to live in a world without the glue to their sisterhood. Reminiscent of The Sky is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson, that’s how hard this book hit me. I never wanted it to end.

The adult part of me, the one that doesn’t consider coloring a productive past time, couldn’t get over the lack of parental supervision. Is this seriously how hippies are with their kids?! I wanted to knock some sense into their mother and protect Asha from the world.

Incredibly beautiful and heartbreaking, The Good Sister is a painful reality of losing a loved one.