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"  &amp;quot;My family will not welcome this,&amp;quot; predicts Jane Alison about her fairy tale-like memoir, The Sisters Antipodes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), but her haunting story is one that truly compels telling. When Jane was four and her sister was six, their parents divorced in order to trade spouses with another couple who had two daughters about the same ages. Their fathers, diplomats stationed at various times in Australia and Washington, DC, switched households, setting off a ripple of identity crises in their offspring. &amp;quot;The absent presence of the other family was never mentioned but always felt,&amp;quot; Alison writes, &amp;quot;a sense of otherness elsewhere to which we were bound.&amp;quot; Although everyone pretended that &amp;quot;everything was fair and right, because everything was even,&amp;quot; all four daughters wound up feeling displaced, and the two youngest\u2014Alison and her &amp;quot;counterpart,&amp;quot; Jenny\u2014 were the most grievously affected: &amp;quot;[Jenny] and I stood hip to hip...hurling darts at a bull&amp;#039;s eye until we&amp;#039;d nearly hurled away our arms, to see who was better, more clever, more able, really worth something, really should win, in fact should be the only one there because we could not both exist.... What lay buried and mute was the panic that...my father seemed likely to slip out of reach while standing there.... He might finally look at me but blink and see nothing. Or look at me but see only Jenny.&amp;quot; Alison&amp;#039;s writing is pointed and poignant, sprinkled with breathtaking intuitions\u2014if also the odd overambitious metaphor. She spent so many years just figuring out how she belongs, and where, and to whom\u2014and often with such tragic results\u2014that her memoir seems less a breach of family ties than an act of bravery. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a9683/elle-reviews-the-sister-antipodes-by-jane-alison/?click=smart&kw=ist&src=smart&mag=ELM&link=-SMT-ELM>