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My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike | 
 enlarge | Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Ecco
Category: Book
List Price: $25.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 10284
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 576
Shipping Weight (lbs): 37.8
Dimensions (in): 19.1 x 13.4 x 7.7
ISBN: 0061547484
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780061547485
ASIN: 0061547484
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Clean tight and unmarked.
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Product Description
New York Times bestselling author of The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys, Joyce Carol Oates returns with a dark, wry, satirical tale—inspired by an unsolved American true-crime mystery. "Dysfunctional families are all alike. Ditto 'survivors.'" So begins the unexpurgated first-person narrative of nineteen-year-old Skyler Rampike, the only surviving child of an "infamous" American family. A decade ago the Rampikes were destroyed by the murder of Skyler's six-year-old ice-skating champion sister, Bliss, and the media scrutiny that followed. Part investigation into the unsolved murder; part elegy for the lost Bliss and for Skyler's own lost childhood; and part corrosively funny expose of the pretensions of upper-middle-class American suburbia, this captivating novel explores with unexpected sympathy and subtlety the intimate lives of those who dwell in Tabloid Hell. Likely to be Joyce Carol Oates's most controversial novel to date, as well as her most boldly satirical, this unconventional work of fiction is sure to be recognized as a classic exploration of the tragic interface between private life and the perilous life of "celebrity." In My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, the incomparable Oates once again mines the depths of the sinister yet comic malaise at the heart of our contemporary culture.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 14 more reviews...
Read it on my Kindle August 18, 2008
I read this book on my Kindle and only discovered through talking with a friend who read it in paper form that there were footnotes throughout the book. On the Kindle, there are asterisks but no footnotes at the bottom of the pages. Only after finishing the book did I find page after page of the footnotes, totally out of context, at the end of the story. I would say that this bothered me except that I looked at the paper version of the book and was so bored by the footnotes that I actually preferred my "no footnotes" Kindle version.
Great story....interesting interpretation of the whole JonBenet saga.
Disjointed narrative worth working through August 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Skyler Rampike, surviving child of the tabloid disaster that is his family, narrates this story. His 6-year-old sister, a prodigy figure skater under the pushy care of their stage mother, is murdered and found in the family's furnace room, with a scribbled and barely readable note left behind and a basement window left ajar. It should sound quite like the JonBenet Ramsey murder, because it is clearly the jumping off point for Oates and she acknowledges it in an upfront disclaimer. Skyler is 19 when the tale begins and he attempts to take us back to his earlier life with his deeply scarred (and deeply scary) parents and the early and final years of his sister "Bliss" and her short career.
The narrative is herky-jerky, with quick cuts and footnotes, and resembles the fits and starts in Skyler's damaged psyche. We discover the depths of his disengagement from life and his parents following the family tragedy slowly, and realize that his pain and drug addictions have their basis in actions that took place well before Bliss was killed. The lifestyles of the wealthy, who can afford to medicate their `difficult' children or hide them away when convenient, while scrambling to maintain their rung on the social ladder, are picked apart by the 9 year-old voice of Skyler and his only slightly more informed teenage self.
Betsey (Mummy) and Bix Rampike, the parents, are absolutely horrid people and terrible parents all along. Unreliable, self-medicating and selfish, these two are probably among the very worst parents Oates has ever used in story or novel. Oates takes us on a journey through some pretty tough satire, in her portrayals of Betsey's ghoulish fame-seeking following Bliss' death and in her open disdain for the industry of psychopharmacology. Skyler's character is, by turns, annoying and sympathetic, unreliable and bitterly truthful. As this family's dysfunction is made more and more clear, though, I think sympathy for our narrator wins out and we want to see him somehow achieve peace, which is pretty hard to find in this disquieting work.
 Difficult Read August 9, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I am glad this was borrowed from the library and not purchased. I struggled to make myself finish the book. I'm not really sure I 'got' it but I'm very happy that I'm done and it is going back to the library. If you want a FANTASTIC read..."The Story of Edgar Sawtelle" is the book of the summer!
Tragic and Comic August 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Our book club's book for August was MY SISTER, MY LOVE by Joyce Carol Oates. Originally we had thought about reading some nonfiction for a change, but then someone suggested a "novelization" of a true story. We were thinking of IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote, but then someone suggested MY SISTER, MY LOVE which is a fictional account of the JonBenet Ramsey murder case. In light of the recent evidence that came to light, we thought this would make for good discussion. And it helped that we have read the Rosamond Smith books in the past, and liked them...so we chose this one! (P.S., For other book clubs, did you know you can often get a bulk discount from a bookstore if you ask for it? We got this hardcover book for not much more than a trade paperback would cost.)
This is mostly a first-person narrative from the perspective of Skyler Rampike, the older brother of the murdered child--who is here named "Bliss Rampike." The setting is New Jersey, not Colorado; and Bliss Rampike is a child skating prodigy rather than a child model. Many of the other details are similar to the Ramsey case, however: the upper-middle class setting in a world of expensive homes and SUV's, the infamous ransom note, and the media feeding frenzy that really never quite abated.
What is most strikingly different is the exploration of the life of the older brother, who was of course suggested as the murderer throughout the years of the Ramsey murder investigation. Here, Skyler is the original target of his parents' ambitions to live vicariously through their children. When young Skyler proves to not have what it takes to be an Olympic gymnast (brought on by a serious accident, perhaps caused by his father, that leads him to limp for the rest of his life), "Mummy" Betsey Ramsey turns her attentions to young Edna Louise, who is rechristened "Bliss" as her skating career begins to take off.
The novel is certainly long, and not as tightly written as the Rosamond Smith mystery/suspense books. Still, most of us found it difficult to put down, as well as heartbreaking. Skyler is basically an orphan in his own family--not enough of a "guy" for his macho father, easily ignored while Mummy devotes all her attention to his sister. Is it any wonder that the poor kid ends up in "special schools" for the troubled children of the wealthy, experimenting with drugs and never forming any real attachments? The novel is gripping not only because we come to care so much about what becomes of poor Skyler, but also for the way Oates "solves" the murder (which, interestingly, does not match the recent evidence that came to light...which led to some good discussions regarding whether a novel must match the facts exactly to be "realistic" or effective).
We wondered how Oates, a woman in her sixties, could so understand the life of a teenage boy--but she does. Several of our women members talked about crying throughout much of the book, while the men talked (a bit uncomfortably) about their adolescent experiences.
One unexpected (and enjoyable) part of the book is a pretty savage look at the pretensions of the nouveau riche, as well as the "industry" that can spring up around tragedy. Among all the pathos, Oates tosses in some really brutal parody that makes you laugh out loud. And, as you might expect, she saves her sympathy for the children who are so brutalized by money-grubbing, social climbing parents.
The chief complaint was that the book is "too long," but when we looked more closely we wondered if this was a valid criticism. We asked, "OK, what would we take out to shorten the book?" But every time we suggested that this or that chapter could be excised, we decided the book would be less rich without it. For example, there's a 50-page chapter that tells about Skyler's failed first romantic relationship (with a character who is supposed to be the daughter of an O.J. Simpson type). Some of the readers said getting rid of it would shorten the book, but others were horrified at the thought, because it's so heart breaking to see this poor broken kid finally reaching out. And it's amazing, with what he went through, that Skyler has any love at all left in his heart--but he does, and to learn more you'll have to read the book.
Another criticism was the occasionally self-conscious literary style, with a lot of references to "my manuscript," as well as a lot of footnotes that break the narrative. We weren't quite sure what these were meant to accomplish, and they did seem to interrupt the flow quite often, but in the end we decided that Oates knows a lot more about novel-writing than we do.
This is a very sad, and sometimes very funny, book, and we thought it was an extraordinary look at the way the sins of the fathers (and mothers) are visited upon the children.
An optician's delight August 8, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
JCO is a gifted writer and her telling of this familiar story is well done. But the editor who thought it was a great idea to add miniature footnotes in italic must have an optician in the family. Not only were the footnotes jarring as they tore you from the story, but they were hard to read for those of us in our doting years. It's a good read but not worth the struggle to physically read it and stay in task.
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