When he shows up at his sister’s apartment asking for help after almost a year of no contact, Willa, a hospital nurse with her own emotional baggage, treats him like a ticking time bomb, keeping her distance even as she invites him in. In his 30s, he’s been adrift for his entire adult life, battling bouts of alcoholism, estranged from an overbearing mother, prone to rash acts and often lacking any fixed address. Richard Mirabella’s debut novel, “Brother & Sister Enter the Forest,” is an eerie, psychologically devastating novel by any measure, but it’s Mirabella’s careful, emotionally honest rendering of the ever-shifting relationship between older brother, Justin, and younger sister, Willa, that marks this book as a revelation. But what about the peculiarly fraught, hard-to-classify dynamic of the boy and girl dyad, two siblings of different genders raised under like conditions but so often saddled with wildly divergent expectations? You’d have to go back to the Greeks, to overwrought Antigone, for a noble case of sister-brother sacrifice or to fairy tales like “Hansel and Gretel” for aspirational brother-sister cooperation.
Fiction shelves are crammed with competing brothers and vying sisters, as well as endless combinations of squabbling trios and embittered foursomes in which a brother and a sister sit within shin-kicking distance amid the bickering family cluster.
Of all the sibling configurations sitting at the crowded dinner table of Western literature, the one that arguably receives the least amount of attention is that of brother and sister.
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