Oystercatchers - Hardcover

Susan Fletcher is the author of Eve Green, which won the Whitbread Award for First Novel, Oystercatchers, and The Highland Witch. She lives in the United Kingdom.

*Starred Review* Sixteen-year-old Amy has lain in a hospital bed for four years, comatose as the result of a head injury. Countless times her sister, Moira, older by 11 years, has sat by the bedside, telling her sister the story of her life. Telling? Confessing is more like it, for Moira, who blames herself for the accident, has always resented her younger sister, blaming her for usurping her place in the family: a scholarship student, Moira was sent off to a girls' school just months before Amy's birth. And, though a brilliant student, she was desperately unhappy at school: a tall, silent, slender girl with glasses, big feet, and big hands, she was unpopular, laughed at, called chicken tits, odd-looking, and worse. Moira tells her often bleak story in a voice that fluctuates between first and third person, making it at once intimate and removed, capturing the adolescent she was and the scientist she would become. Fletcher is a novelist with the soul of a poet, and Oystercatchers is exquisitely written and unafraid of risk: its pace is unhurried, and its protagonist, Moira, is often unlikable, but any reader who cares for gorgeous writing, richly realized setting, and character will find much here to treasure. Cart, Michael