The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters

Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction , Health & Nutrition

Elisabeth Robinson, a Hollywood producer and screenwriter whose credits include the movies Last Orders and Braveheart, published this semi-autobiographical work, her debut, in 2004.  Robinson's younger sister died from leukemia in 1998.  At the outset of The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters, her protagonist, Olivia Hunt, a struggling Hollywood producer, is contemplating suicide.  She is interrupted by a call from her parents in Ohio:  her newly married younger sister, Maddie, has been diagnosed with leukemia.

The novel is told through Olivia's letters:  to her ex-boyfriend, Michael, whom she still loves; to the doctors at the hospital where her sister is being treated; to the head honchos at the studio where her current project, a film of Don Quixote, is having a hard time getting off the ground.

As Olivia jets from L.A. to Spain (where the movie is being filmed) to her hometown in Shawnee Falls, she is accompanied everywhere she goes by thoughts of Maddie.  After numerous treatments fail, Maddie remains relentlessly optimistic, even planning for future children her family knows she may never have.  The book's weighty subject matter is buoyed by Robinson's breezy and frequently funny writing style.  Never overtly maudlin, the novel is a powerful tribute to the bond between sisters.  It's simply unforgettable.

There are a few other books on this same topic that I highly recommend.  In Marisa Acocella Marchetto's memoir Cancer Vixen, the cartoonist details her nightmarish discovery of a lump in her breast shortly before her wedding.  Three siblings struggle to help their father through the final stages of cancer in Eliza Minot's The Brambles.  A radio talk show host and mother of two teenagers learns she has only months to live in Cheryl Strayed's moving Torch.