The Wicked Sister by Karen Dionne

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 304 pages, $27

I loved “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” Karen Dionne’s first book. “The Wicked Sister” has many of the same elements: the great outdoors, survival skills, deranged family members. In addition, the book has a great premise: a twenty-six year old woman has been voluntarily residing in a mental health facility since she was eleven. She believes she killed her parents. What is known is that she ran away into the woods around her home and survived for two weeks. When she was found, she was catatonic. She is not incarcerated or involuntarily held now, because the official story is her father killed her mother before killing himself.

Rachel, the young woman at the heart of the novel, sees living in the mental facility in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as her just punishment. Her only two friends are fellow resident Scotty, a young man with severely limited skills but a pleasant demeanor, and Scotty’s brother, Trevor, who visits him frequently. Trevor knows who Rachel is and he wants to write a story about her and her family. He has acquired information, including the police report. From that report, Rachel learns the rifle which killed her parents could not have been fired by a little eleven-year-old girl. Since Rachel cannot remember the killing or her two weeks in the wilderness, she is astounded by the revelation that she may not be the killer after all. Years of inaction turn into sudden determination. Rachel checks herself out and with Trevor’s help goes back to her family home.

There is a fairy tale sound to “The Wicked Sister,” as there was to “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” Rachel’s childhood seemed idyllic. She lived in “wild and beautiful surroundings, a hunting lodge as splendid as a castle in the middle of a mysterious, impenetrable forest; [with] intelligent and loving parents who treated me like a princess involving me in their work as if I were their peer while giving me the freedom to explore, learn, grow.”

Rachel’s parents were wildlife biologists and raised their daughters to explore and survive in the wild forest land surrounding the lodge. Diana, Rachel’s sister, was nine years old when Rachel was born. When Rachel returns to the lodge, we find out what happened to Diana and to their Aunt Charlotte, sister to their mother, who lived with the family. Also living on the family land was Max, Charlotte’s boyfriend.

As more characters are introduced, Rachel’s story becomes fleshed out. We learn why her parents moved from the big city to the backwoods, why Charlotte began living with the family, why life was perhaps not as idyllic as first described. It’s a wicked story. But who is the wicked sister?

Rachel’s first-person chapters alternate with chapters from her mother Jenny’s point of view. So present day vis-à-vis back when. Each unfolding of a piece of the back story made me feel as though ants were crawling on me. I would feel sympathy for one character, followed by revulsion for the same person. Were the woods crawling with psychopaths? It certainly seemed that way sometimes. But of course that wasn’t true, and Dionne wends her way back to a revelation of what really happened all those years ago.

I found it a much tougher read than “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” I think that’s primarily because Helena, the main character in “Marsh King,” appeared sturdier and mentally stronger than Rachel does at the beginning of her story. There were times in both mother’s and daughter’s stories that I shouted at them to get a grip! “The Wicked Sister” seemed more farfetched, although isn’t that what fairy tales are?

The tale of the marsh king is given a brief mention towards the end of “The Wicked Sister.” That was the only cute in a book not dependent on cuteness.