Sisters Brothers (deWitt) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[G]ritty, as well as deadpan and often very comic…DeWitt has chosen a narrative voice so sharp and distinctive…it’s very narrowing of possibilities opens new doors in the imagination.
New York Times


[deWitt] rides parallel to the trails of Jack Shaefer, James Carlos Blake and Cormac McCarthy, but he frequently crosses into comic territory to produce a story that's weirdly funny, startlingly violent and steeped in sadness…As the novel runs along, deWitt shifts the story in unpredictable directions, slowing the pace for a surreal finale in the woods that's touched with alchemy.
Ron Charles - Washington Post


A feast of delights in short punchy chapters.... Deliciously original and rhapsodically funny, this is one novel that ropes you in on page one, and isn’t about to ride off into the sunset any time soon.
Boston Globe


[F]ull of surprises, among them…is the quirky beauty of the language Patrick deWitt has devised for his narrator.... The Sisters Brothers is deWitt’s second novel…and is an inventive and ingenious character study. It will make you impatient for the third.
Dallas Morning News


If Cormac McCarthy had a sense of humor, he might have concocted a story like Patrick DeWitt’s bloody, darkly funny western The Sisters Brothers.... [DeWitt has] a skillfully polished voice and a penchant for gleefully looking under bloody bandages.
Los Angeles Times


Wandering his Western landscape with the cool confidence of a practiced pistoleer, deWitt’s steady hand belies a hair trigger, a poet’s heart and an acute sense of gallows humor…the reader is likely to reach the adventure’s end in the same shape as Eli: wounded but bettered by the ride.
Time Out New York


Thrilling…a lushly voiced picaresque story…so richly told, so detailed, that what emerges is a weird circus of existence, all steel shanks and ponies, gut shots and medication poured into the eyeholes of the dying. At some level, this too is a kind of revenge story, marvelously blurry.
Esquire


[Q]uirky and stylish revisionist western.... [A] frontier baron known as the Commodore orders Charlie and Eli Sisters, his hired gunslingers, to track down and kill a prospector named Herman Kermit Warm.... Charlie and Eli ...come off looking less and less like killers and more like traumatized young men.... DeWitt has produced a genre-bending frontier saga that is exciting, funny, and, perhaps unexpectedly, moving.
Publishers Weekly


[E]ngrossing...a gritty, unapologetic homage to pulp Westerns (with perhaps a nod to Cormac McCarthy as well). In the final pages, however, as the hired guns at the center of the story are forced by circumstances to rethink their lives, the novel turns into something much more philosophical, existential, and extraordinary.... It becomes, in effect, a different kind of novel, profoundly literary, and devoted to serious philosophical meditation. —Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
Library Journal


A calmly vicious journey into avarice and revenge. The unusual title refers to Charlie and Eli Sisters, the latter of whom narrates the novel. The narrative style is flat, almost unfeeling, though the action turns toward the cold-blooded. It's 1851, and the mysterious Commodore has hired the Sisters brothers to execute a man who's turned against him.... DeWitt creates a homage to life in the Wild West but at the same time reveals its brutality.
Kirkus Reviews