The Orphan Sister by Gwendolen Gross

The Orphan Sister is not what I expected. The back of the books says,

Clementine Lord is not an orphan. She just feels like one sometimes. One of triplets, a quirk of nature left her the odd one out. Odette and Olivia are identical; Clementine is a singleton. Biologically speaking, she came from her own egg. Practically speaking, she never quite left it.

Then Clementine’s father – a pediatric neurologist who is an expert on children’s brains, but clueless when it comes to his own daughters – disappears and his choices both past and present, force the family dynamics to change at last. As the three sisters struggle to make sense of it, their mother must emerge from the greenhouse and leave the flowers that have long been the focus of her warmth and nurturing.

For Clementine, the next step means retracing the winding route that led her to this very moment: to understand her father’s betrayal, the tragedy of her first lost love, her family’s divisions, and her best friend Eli’s sudden romantic interest. Most of all, she may finally have found the voice with which to shape the inside story of being the odd sister out.

So after reading the back, I imagined the story starting out with the birth of the triplets and then going into their childhood, showing Clementine’s struggle as the odd sister out. I figured the story would climax with the disappearance of their father, probably somewhere around their teenage years when Clementine discovers what she needs to about herself. I was very wrong.

The story starts out with Clementine in her late twenties and her dad had just disappeared. It continues from this point with Clementine constantly flashing back to her past. Her father returns (before reading the book, I didn’t think that he was going to return, another instance where I was wrong) and must face the family with why he left without telling them where he was going. Only at the very end does the family figure out how to live without Dr. Lord and only some have come to terms with why he disappeared.

I’m not sure that I would recommend this book. There is some bad language, although I can understand why it is used, and Clementine is often bringing up sex, in her past and in the present. The story of triplets where 2 are identical and one is not is an interesting concept. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more without my preconceived ideas. If you’re interested give it a try.