The Monthly Read: Come Again?
A Review of My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
The radical title of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer, may cause you to look twice.
I know it got my attention.
However, this book is not for fans of horror; it’s not like In Cold Blood or American Predator, both non-fictions concerning real-life killers. Instead, the serial killing in this book is a metaphor for the deeper ways we “kill” one another. Near the end, a wise person tells Korede: “The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.”
The book is about two young women who are total opposites. Korede is efficient, as a nurse should be, but also quietly reflective. Ayoola is hedonistic and spoiled, as a younger sister might be, as well as thoughtless. Physically, Korede is plain and dark skinned; Ayoola has an hourglass shape and Carmel-colored skin. Men literally flock to Ayoola, but she soon dispatches them with her dead-father’s knife, a nine-inch curved blade which we’re told “was the thing he was most proud of.” There’s deep irony in the fact that during his life he cheated on his wife and beat his daughters, but Korede says that when he was cleaning the knife “was the only time I ever witnessed tenderness from him.”
The sisters live in the crowded, bustling city of Lagos, Nigeria, in a home bought with money obtained through their father’s corrupt business dealings. The setting is like a character in itself, since its torrential rains, corrupt police, and distinctive African culture directly affect the action. For instance, Nigerian culture would seem to dictate that whenever anyone visits your house, you must offer him cake, a tradition that some Americans might appreciate. However, the women’s movement seems not yet to have arrived in Nigeria where young women are still primarily concerned with getting married and caring for their husbands. And who would have thought that after a family member has been dead for ten years—like the girls’ father—that you would be expected to “throw an anniversary party in honor of his life”?
Society and her family dictate most of what Korede does, so it’s no wonder that she’s jealous and resentful. Korede does the cooking but her mother tells everyone that Ayoola made it. As the older sister, Korede is responsible for her younger sister. If “Ayoola would break a glass, [Ko-rede] would receive the blame for giving her the drink.” After each murder, Ayoola calls Korede to come clean up the mess and dispose of the body. She is a nurse who deals in death rather than in healing. Crime scenes and motives are never examined since the book is not a police procedural. The police are portrayed as ineffective and Ayoola is untroubled by what she’s done. She never tells Korede what really happened to make her kill her boyfriends, just that they were unfortunate mistakes, ones that she keeps making over and over, however. “Femi makes three, you know,” Ko-rede says about Ayoola’s most recent victim “Three, and they label you a serial killer.” Korede is more upset about the killings than her sister and has to keep reminding Ayoola to show the proper remorse, and not post pictures on social media of the flowers she received from her most recent admirer. Yet Korede recognizes her part as an accomplice and enabler. Then Korede’s disgust ramps up even more when Ayoola starts dating the man Korede is secretly in love with, a kind doctor named Tade whom she works with at the hospital.
It’s bad enough that Tade isn’t aware of Korede’s love for him, but when he meets and decides to marry Ayoola, Korede is faced with a conundrum. If she protects Tade by telling him that his fiancé is a serial killer, then Ayoola will go to jail. If she is loyal to her little sis and says nothing, then the man she loves will go to his death. Either way, she will lose someone.
By this point in the novel, the plot is sufficiently complex that readers might wonder how in the world the author will resolve it and whether or not the resolution will be satisfying. It’s an understatement to say that the ending is quite unexpected, seeming to contradict everything that went before. But consistency is only relevant if the action of the novel is taken seriously. If the whole thing is meant as a joke, then you can laugh it off. Reviewers have called the novel a dark comedy. Dark because the characters assume the worst about each other, and that’s usually what they get. And it’s a comedy because the entire book pokes fun at human flaws: Korede is too critical: Ayoola, too thoughtless; their father, too cruel; Tade (like most men in the novel) too superficial—he just wants a pretty face.
Korede and Ayoola are such stereotypical opposites that they seem to be two halves of the same whole. And when two halves are separated, it’s natural to want them put back together. Separation and reunification are common themes in comedy, such as in Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing where Beatrice and Benedict begin by despising one another, but end up by getting married. If characters in a drama are not reunited, then it is a tragedy, such as in Romeo and Juliet. And without writing a spoiler, let’s just say that the two sisters are eventually reunited, although not in the way that Korede might have wished for. The novel is told from Korede’s point of view, and despite her insistence that she wants to be an honest person, when given the chance to tell the truth, she doesn’t.
Oyinkan Braithwaite has said in interviews that when she set out to write My Sister, the Serial Killer, she was trying to forget about her attempt to write a “great” novel, and just wanted to create something fun and light hearted, not how we usually think of murder, but the book has much deadpan humor. The book has been called a thriller, a fantasy, and domestic fiction. The author herself classifies it as noir fiction, a subgenre of crime fiction in which right and wrong are not clearly defined. This novel will appeal to many people and can be read in many ways, always a characteristic of good writing. Because of this, it was long listed for the prestigious Man Booker prize for fiction in 2019 and is being made into a movie. It’s a fun, suspenseful read that will still give you something to think about.
