Sister Mine

Sister Mine is a novel by the Jamaican-Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson, published in 2013. It mixes a contemporary urban setting with family history of a rather extraordinary kind.

Makeda and Abby have been close all their lives, partly because they share a body for their first years and partly because of the way they were raised. Their father is a god of growing things, their mother was human, and the family they belong to includes relatives who endure and relatives who die like anyone else.

The difference between the sisters is magic. Abby has it, and it shows itself early in a singing voice that is not of this world; Makeda does not have it at all, which is a kind of exile in a family where it is assumed. Makeda moves into a warehouse space in a district full of people who are not magic, intending to build a life for herself among them, and the story she tells is the account of what happens when her sister disappears and the search for her requires exactly the thing Makeda has spent her life not having.