THE PORCELAIN SISTERS, sibling rivalry hurts the very fabric of one's being

THE PORCELAIN SISTERS
DARYL GREGORY
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A shy young woman and her deeply unpleasant—and literally porcelain—sister fight for their inheritance, taking on an impossible array of enemies: a chain-smoking demon crow, an unkillable assassin, and a secret clan of French sorceresses. In his newest adventure, Daryl Gregory (Spoonbenders) takes us on a dizzying romp through the horrors of sisterhood.

Ruth Winslow is trying to save up enough money to finish college while looking after her sister, Isabel—who happens to be a haunted doll. When an accident severely damages Isabel’s porcelain body, the sisters have to find the only woman who can fix her, the fearsome witch known as La Fabricante: the Dollmaker.

The sisters head to Marseille, where they take on Le Clan: Chiffon, a red-headed, unkillable assassin; a collection of angry, haunted dolls; plus a pair of demons—one a cigarette-smoking crow, the other a black cat—and their human familiars.

Along the way, the sisters learn that they’ve been lied to their entire lives. Their mother wasn’t just a homemaker who died in a car accident, she was a legendary enforcer in the Le Clan des Sorcières.

While Ruth has to come out of her shell and deal with her own latent powers, Isabel has to grow up in a body that can’t grow. Together they’ll have to outwit and outfight everyone to claim their birthright.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Ruth and Isabel are (unwillingly) close. Their sisterly bond has survived trying, testing circumstances like loss of their mother, growing up isolated, and Isabel being a haunted porcelain doll. Who is broken badly twice, once in a car accident, once in a fall. Now Ruth has to use her college savings to get them to France in order to find and then convince the original maker of Isabel's doll body to mend her. You can read the blurb, you see it as well as I do.

We're going on The Hero's Journey. Only with women at the center, distinctly different from the stereotypical boy/chosen one, since it's about fixing their loved one instead of leading The People, like Arthur. (Men keep doing that. Wonder why.)

It's a fun trip, full of great villains, exciting traps, and the unfolding weirdness of Isabel's...genesis. There's a reason Ruth has a porcelain doll as a sister. It's not a fantasy or a dream or a comforting lie told to a grieving child. Their father finally had had enough of Isabel's cruel words, snarky ways, and abusive personality, which separation is what set the sisters on course to a *real* bust-up. Both behave abominally...siblings often do...so each needs absolution and atonement.

Among the little they know about their vanished mother is that she was French and from Marseilles. It's enough to piece together an answer to what the initials "CdS" on Isabel's back mean...Clan des Sorcières, Witch Clan...mean and thus lead them to a source, an original maker: La Fabricante, the (Doll) Maker. None of this is easy, nor does it take a linear form like I'm telling it to you in. I am, as regular readers will know, a fan of corvids. I liked Shit Turd from The Hollow Kingdom a couple years back, partly for being a crow, mostly for having a "foul" (see the wordplay? hahaha) mouth. But S.T. was a fling compared to my true love, Monsieur Griezzel the chainsmoking music-hall-joking antagonist. Of a sort. He's a delight with a wicked (literally) line of patter.

I confess now to a surprising weakness: Dolls are second only to clowns in my Pantheon of Nightmares. I hate 'em. Why'd I request the story, then...look at the date, being scared's de rigueur. In reading this story of sororital rage and parental neglect, of love looking weird from some angles, of guilt moving mountains that love quails before, I was unable to do more than remember why dolls creep me out. It was not the story, it was me; I became so immersed in the story I absorbed uts frame of reference over my own. I even *got* their mother's actions as genuinely kindly motivated in the moment.

No perfect score for you, Daryl Gregory. Brevity may be the soul of wit and of lingerie, but it's the downfall of a satisfying connection between reader and main character. Ruth and Isavel's trajectories are show very much from the outside, which is part of the point of making one a literal doll, ojay I get it...but move more slowly, please, to tell me more about the titanic impact of this on the women. Bickering, fighting, being jealous are all symptoms...tell me of what in more than labels, please.

It's not a quibble but it's also not what I was promised in a book this short. I wasn't told I'd read Anna Karenina and suddenly got Valley of the Dolls. So a minor ding and only because I liked what I got so much I wanted more.

So: I want some more, please sir. Soon would be good.