Max and Luke Joyce, sisters whose mother gave them traditionally male names, survived being orphaned only to end up worlds apart as adults. Each sister dealt with the tragedy of losing their parents and a middle sister in completely different ways: Max has perfection. She’s an up-and-coming physician with a handsome husband, 2.5 kids (a bassoon is the .5), complete with a white picket-fenced pristine house. Luke has dealt with debilitating depression and feels like a burdensome mess with her going-nowhere poetry, cheap apartment, and dead-end job. But when Max’s perfect life is torn apart by her husband having a full-blown midlife crisis, she asks Luke for help to pick up the pieces.
As the sisters readjust to each other’s company, sibling rivalry and birth-order roles never far from the surface, Max’s life takes a downward spiral with her husband acting like one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys—complete with running away to the Outback, while Luke’s life navigates toward the better—meeting a dreamy, swoon-worthy man who can’t get enough of her, even after she’s told him of her clinical depression. Bickering, yelling, silent treatments, making up, and trying like hell to allow each other to grow, the sisters have so much to overcome. But all the progress could be stopped short by the dark secret both of them have kept: the accident that killed their parents and sister wasn’t an accident at all.
Red L. Jameson 