Sisters by a River - Barbara Comyns

Sisters by a River is good escape fare. Such an odd book narrated in short pieces in first person by a young girl growing up amidst a large family of five sisters, a mad mother who is deaf, a nutty grandmother and an alcoholic father plus various staff, governesses and helpers and dogs in a rambling mansion along the River Avon in England. "Mammy had her excape in her imaginary lovers, we children did not have much excape in the winter, but when the summer came there was the sun and river, some mornings I would get up at five and row up the river before anyone else had been on it, and the larks would be singing and the cows standing together in the little bays where the water was shallow, and everything would seem so good and clean, I felt I wanted to cry with so much hapiness, this feeling would sometimes stay with me all day."

I can't really figure why it is so compelling. I want to keep reading but there's an anxiety as to how it will end? Violence? Bankruptcy? Abandonment? Is it to see if she grows up in the face of so much antagonism from parents and older sister Mary who's twenty by the end of the book to the author's sixteen? Is it to see what is next in the escapades of the six sisters? Or in their tales and animals? Is it to see if she learns to spell? The quirky misspellings are intact in the book and they scream out at me as I read along, "horrorible" or frit for fright or tiered for tired, imaginative and not impossible, but they jerk the reader out of the story, especially a grammatical reader. But like all Barbara Comyns's novels thus far, I am completely in her thrall and cannot wait to pick up another story plus the new biography.

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