Genre Fiction
![Elizabeth Weiss - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B094N13F9Z.jpg)
The Sisters Sweet: A Novel
A young woman in a vaudeville sister act must learn to forge her own path after her twin runs away to Hollywood in this richly immersive debut about love, family, and friendship.
"A beautifully told coming-of-age story that embraces life with a galloping energy and irresistible curiosity."-Maggie Shipstead, New York Times bestselling author of Great Circle
Leaving was my sister's choice. I would have to make my own.
All Harriet Szász has ever known is life onstage with her sister, Josie. As "The Sisters Sweet," they pose as conjoined twins in a vaudeville act conceived of by their ambitious parents, who were once themselves theatrical stars. But after Josie exposes the family's fraud and runs away to Hollywood, Harriet must learn to live out of the spotlight-and her sister's shadow. As Josie's star rises in California, the Szászes fall on hard times. Striving to keep her struggling family afloat, Harriet molds herself into the perfect daughter. She also tentatively forms her first relationships outside her family and begins to imagine a life for herself beyond the role of dutiful daughter that she has played for so long. Finally, Harriet must decide whether to honor her mother, her father, or the self she's only beginning to get to know.
Full of long-simmering tensions, buried secrets, questionable saviors, and broken promises, this is a story about how much we are beholden to others and what we owe ourselves. Layered and intimate, The Sisters Sweet heralds the arrival of an accomplished new voice in fiction.
"A beautifully told coming-of-age story that embraces life with a galloping energy and irresistible curiosity."-Maggie Shipstead, New York Times bestselling author of Great Circle
Leaving was my sister's choice. I would have to make my own.
All Harriet Szász has ever known is life onstage with her sister, Josie. As "The Sisters Sweet," they pose as conjoined twins in a vaudeville act conceived of by their ambitious parents, who were once themselves theatrical stars. But after Josie exposes the family's fraud and runs away to Hollywood, Harriet must learn to live out of the spotlight-and her sister's shadow. As Josie's star rises in California, the Szászes fall on hard times. Striving to keep her struggling family afloat, Harriet molds herself into the perfect daughter. She also tentatively forms her first relationships outside her family and begins to imagine a life for herself beyond the role of dutiful daughter that she has played for so long. Finally, Harriet must decide whether to honor her mother, her father, or the self she's only beginning to get to know.
Full of long-simmering tensions, buried secrets, questionable saviors, and broken promises, this is a story about how much we are beholden to others and what we owe ourselves. Layered and intimate, The Sisters Sweet heralds the arrival of an accomplished new voice in fiction.
Editorial Reviews
"The Sisters Sweet will charm you into another world. Weiss has conjured a lost America with wit, sorrow, and beauty-a book like a favorite old movie."-Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Less
"At once intimate and epic, The Sisters Sweet is an ambitious, intricately constructed, and immensely satisfying story about a family of performers-both onstage and off. This is a deeply immersive novel about the lives-and aspirations-of women. I loved it."-Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Dreamers
"The Sisters Sweet is both cinematic and humane, an expansive and gorgeously written tale of a family that's at once spectacularly offbeat and fundamentally human."-Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
"Imaginative . . . Weiss explores the intriguing theme of a woman understood only in relation to others. . . . [T]here are plenty of rich details, and each scene is well drawn. Weiss is clearly talented."-Publishers Weekly
"[A]stute and descriptive narration . . . Readers who enjoy bittersweet, coming-of-age stories like Anna Quindlen's Miller's Valley or The Distance Home by Paula Saunders will root for Harriet."-Booklist
"Interesting characters and rich period setting . . . a promising debut."-Kirkus
"At once intimate and epic, The Sisters Sweet is an ambitious, intricately constructed, and immensely satisfying story about a family of performers-both onstage and off. This is a deeply immersive novel about the lives-and aspirations-of women. I loved it."-Karen Thompson Walker, author of The Dreamers
"The Sisters Sweet is both cinematic and humane, an expansive and gorgeously written tale of a family that's at once spectacularly offbeat and fundamentally human."-Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had
"Imaginative . . . Weiss explores the intriguing theme of a woman understood only in relation to others. . . . [T]here are plenty of rich details, and each scene is well drawn. Weiss is clearly talented."-Publishers Weekly
"[A]stute and descriptive narration . . . Readers who enjoy bittersweet, coming-of-age stories like Anna Quindlen's Miller's Valley or The Distance Home by Paula Saunders will root for Harriet."-Booklist
"Interesting characters and rich period setting . . . a promising debut."-Kirkus
Short Excerpt Teaser
Chapter 1
A rainy morning, late spring of 1918. Josie and I, five years old, sat together at the table in the little, muggy kitchen, pressing craters into our porridge with the backs of our spoons and watching them ooze shut again. Mama, who had warned us twice already not to play with our food, was stirring something in a pot, her hair wrapped in a red flannel cloth, a cigarette clamped between her teeth, her forehead mottled and glistening, when the door swung open and Daddy swept in, waving a pale garment high above his head. I dragged my spoon through my porridge and sighed just loudly enough for Josie to hear. Another costume.
For as long as I could remember, Daddy had been trying to convince Mama to get us into show business-the family business, he called it, when we scrambled up onto his knees and begged him for a story, and instead of a fairy tale he told us about his grandfather, the dancer, or his grandmother, who had been in a traveling show, or his parents' puppet theater, or, best of all, the stories we wanted most but knew better than to ask for, stories that would only come when Daddy was in the mood to offer them, which depended on Mama being in the mood to give him tacit permission: stories about their glory days, when Mama was a star of the Follies, and Daddy built the sets on which she performed. (We knew Mama had had an accident, that it was the reason she used a cane, that it had ended her career and inaugurated the poverty into which we had been born, though that didn't figure into Daddy's lore, and I couldn't have said how I learned any of it; the accident was a foundational fact of our lives, part of the history that belonged neither to memory nor to telling. The history that simply was.) When Daddy described relieving Mama of an unwieldy freight of roses as she came offstage, she pretended to scoff. When he told us about how she'd come on as Lady Godiva in a flesh-colored body stocking, her long yellow wig arranged to reinforce the illusion of her nudity, and three young men had actually fainted from excitement, she swatted the back of his head and said, "Oh really." But Josie and I knew it was okay to smile. If Mama had really been angry, she would have gone silent, or retreated into one of the long baths she took to escape the rest of us. Instead, she lingered. She fussed at a potted fern. She sat and mended a blouse, only pretending not to listen.
But whenever Daddy turned the conversation to Josie and me-when he said let's just teach them a number, see what they can do-Mama's eyes would go cold. Absolutely not, she'd say. Over my dead body. Until one morning Mama and Josie and I heard a ruckus outside and went to the window. There was Daddy on the sidewalk beside an upright piano, a crowd at his back.
I don't know what finally persuaded Mama: the sight of our father, sunburned and panting, arm draped over the piano as if it were a prize rhino he'd just shot down; the four men who emerged from the crowd to carry the piano up to the third floor, who laughed as they wiped the sweat from their faces, who insisted on kissing Mama's hand and then toasting her fine specimen of a husband, who'd just moved that piano ten blocks, all by himself; his blistered feet and bloodied ankles, which she cleaned and bandaged. But the next morning, she took Josie and me to a shop on Twenty-Third Street and bought us tap shoes on credit. That afternoon, she sat down at the piano and taught us our first song. Just like that, we were an act: The Magnificent Singing Szász Twins.
Right away, Daddy started making costumes. He sewed skirts of rose tulle. He bent slim wires into the shape of butterfly wings and wrapped them in green net. He constructed denim overalls and red cotton work shirts for us to wear during choreographed trots on broomstick ponies. He dressed Josie in an ivory wedding gown and me in a shiny black tuxedo and a top hat fashioned from a scrap of black silk and some rolled-up pasteboard. Whenever he came home with another bolt of fabric Mama would scowl. She'd ask him if he'd married and murdered an heiress she didn't know about. Sometimes he brushed her aside, sometimes he risked a fight by snapping back that the fabric had been a gift from a friend-they still had friends in the theater. But by the time he sat down at the sewing machine and fed a cotton cuff or a pleated panel of butter yellow organza under the needle, he would be grinning.
As the months wore on without a callback, let alone a job, no one blamed me, not out loud. But I could see as clearly as anyone that Josie's voice was effortlessly sweet and true, while I had to try and try again to match the pitches Mama played on the piano. I knew that when Josie danced, her whole body seemed to float, as if carried by invi...
A rainy morning, late spring of 1918. Josie and I, five years old, sat together at the table in the little, muggy kitchen, pressing craters into our porridge with the backs of our spoons and watching them ooze shut again. Mama, who had warned us twice already not to play with our food, was stirring something in a pot, her hair wrapped in a red flannel cloth, a cigarette clamped between her teeth, her forehead mottled and glistening, when the door swung open and Daddy swept in, waving a pale garment high above his head. I dragged my spoon through my porridge and sighed just loudly enough for Josie to hear. Another costume.
For as long as I could remember, Daddy had been trying to convince Mama to get us into show business-the family business, he called it, when we scrambled up onto his knees and begged him for a story, and instead of a fairy tale he told us about his grandfather, the dancer, or his grandmother, who had been in a traveling show, or his parents' puppet theater, or, best of all, the stories we wanted most but knew better than to ask for, stories that would only come when Daddy was in the mood to offer them, which depended on Mama being in the mood to give him tacit permission: stories about their glory days, when Mama was a star of the Follies, and Daddy built the sets on which she performed. (We knew Mama had had an accident, that it was the reason she used a cane, that it had ended her career and inaugurated the poverty into which we had been born, though that didn't figure into Daddy's lore, and I couldn't have said how I learned any of it; the accident was a foundational fact of our lives, part of the history that belonged neither to memory nor to telling. The history that simply was.) When Daddy described relieving Mama of an unwieldy freight of roses as she came offstage, she pretended to scoff. When he told us about how she'd come on as Lady Godiva in a flesh-colored body stocking, her long yellow wig arranged to reinforce the illusion of her nudity, and three young men had actually fainted from excitement, she swatted the back of his head and said, "Oh really." But Josie and I knew it was okay to smile. If Mama had really been angry, she would have gone silent, or retreated into one of the long baths she took to escape the rest of us. Instead, she lingered. She fussed at a potted fern. She sat and mended a blouse, only pretending not to listen.
But whenever Daddy turned the conversation to Josie and me-when he said let's just teach them a number, see what they can do-Mama's eyes would go cold. Absolutely not, she'd say. Over my dead body. Until one morning Mama and Josie and I heard a ruckus outside and went to the window. There was Daddy on the sidewalk beside an upright piano, a crowd at his back.
I don't know what finally persuaded Mama: the sight of our father, sunburned and panting, arm draped over the piano as if it were a prize rhino he'd just shot down; the four men who emerged from the crowd to carry the piano up to the third floor, who laughed as they wiped the sweat from their faces, who insisted on kissing Mama's hand and then toasting her fine specimen of a husband, who'd just moved that piano ten blocks, all by himself; his blistered feet and bloodied ankles, which she cleaned and bandaged. But the next morning, she took Josie and me to a shop on Twenty-Third Street and bought us tap shoes on credit. That afternoon, she sat down at the piano and taught us our first song. Just like that, we were an act: The Magnificent Singing Szász Twins.
Right away, Daddy started making costumes. He sewed skirts of rose tulle. He bent slim wires into the shape of butterfly wings and wrapped them in green net. He constructed denim overalls and red cotton work shirts for us to wear during choreographed trots on broomstick ponies. He dressed Josie in an ivory wedding gown and me in a shiny black tuxedo and a top hat fashioned from a scrap of black silk and some rolled-up pasteboard. Whenever he came home with another bolt of fabric Mama would scowl. She'd ask him if he'd married and murdered an heiress she didn't know about. Sometimes he brushed her aside, sometimes he risked a fight by snapping back that the fabric had been a gift from a friend-they still had friends in the theater. But by the time he sat down at the sewing machine and fed a cotton cuff or a pleated panel of butter yellow organza under the needle, he would be grinning.
As the months wore on without a callback, let alone a job, no one blamed me, not out loud. But I could see as clearly as anyone that Josie's voice was effortlessly sweet and true, while I had to try and try again to match the pitches Mama played on the piano. I knew that when Josie danced, her whole body seemed to float, as if carried by invi...
