The longest chapter I could find was four pages, each with a chapter title of only one or two words. The next chapter is longer, but it’s only two and a half pages, the next one and half. I had hoped I would never hear those words again. The first page is also the first chapter, the entirety of which I will give you here:Īyoola summons me with these words–Korede, I killed him. This is not a spoiler because we learn it on the first page. MSTSK tells the story of Korede, the older, dutiful, plainer sister of the gorgeous Ayoola. Note that we cannot do so without revealing some spoilers. The ending is not uplifting yet it was still a satisfying read.īND is a Facebook book club for writers four times a year we choose a breakout novel to take apart using questions derived from Donald Maass’s craft books and mine it for insights we can use in our own fiction.
Braithwaite delivers the setting in deft slashes, giving us a rich picture of the main character’s social and cultural context, as well as her family situation. The writing and plotting is tight and spare yet dense in the way that poetry is (which makes sense, since Braithwaite is also a poet). That tip of the hat to Emily Dickinson provides a good segue to three things we thought Braithwaite did particularly well: This was a fresh enough concept that it felt like a relief–yet the novel itself was anything but a relief. At least one Dissector wasn’t going to read it until someone let slip that the novel is actually about the sister of the serial killer, about her moral choices and her change. It’s not about figuring out who the serial killer is, or whether she’ll get caught, if a particular victim will be found in time, or why she does what she does. This novel is not about the serial killer. But first, something we appreciated as readers: We’ll be exploring the writerly lessons the Writer Unboxed Breakout Novel Dissection crew learned from Oyinkan Braithwaite’s breakout novel, My Sister, the Serial Killer (MSTSK). Although I love it when the title forms a sentence, no sisters and no serial killers will be harmed in this post (although perhaps they should be).
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