My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece (review)

It's been five years since Jamie's older sister, Rose, was killed in a London terrorist attack, and Rose's loss has been the center of the family ever since. After Jamie's mother leaves the family, Jamie, his father, and Jasmine—Rose's surviving twin—move north (their newly xenophobic father is intent on "getting away from the Muslims"); there ten-year-old Jamie wishes fervently that his father would stop drinking and that his incommunicado mother would at least reach out to her son. He does manage to make a good friend, though: his sparky, imaginative classmate, Sunya, who's as much as an outsider as he is—and who is a devout Muslim. Pitcher draws a vivid picture of Jamie's family, where Rose is more important than anyone actually alive (Jamie's mother even makes him redo a school essay so that it's about Rose) and the surviving children struggle to be noticed. Sunya is a magnetic character, well supplied with the kind of nerve that Jamie lacks, and there are hints that this is a relationship that may actually lead toward early romance. The book complicates the story's resolution with several layers of contrivance, though, between the death of Jamie's beloved cat, Jamie and Jasmine's participation in a television talent show, his parents' sudden turnaround, and the kids' quick forgiveness for their years of abandonment, betraying the emotional honesty of the beginning. Readers willing to overlook that reductive conclusion will find Jamie's predicament moving, however, and they'll support his friendship with Sunya as he tries to find his own way.