Sisters and the Undertaker's Son: A novel manuscript with a critical introduction

Abstract

"The Sisters and The Undertaker's Son" is a first-person narrative about a fifteen-year-old girl, Shine, from a small town in central Illinois. The time is Christmas, 1979. At the opening of the book, Shine's family goes bankrupt, an older sister Shine has never met shows up on the doorstep and ruins Shine's birthday party, and a great aunt dies but fails to leave Shine's family an inheritance. In the book, Shine attempts to form various relationships, including one with her unhappy and secretive mother; her absent, truck-driving father; her attention-getting half-sister, Rowena; her precocious sister, Mosha; her unthinking cousin, Arnold; and the moody, dark undertaker's son, Rembrandt. Shine even sits atop the Second Baptist Church and waits for "God in the Sun" to appear to her. She wants to be recognized and loved, and she will resort to greater and more desperate measures to achieve her goal, including dropping out of school, getting married, and trying to rid herself of Rowena forever.