Book Review: The Ballad of Two Sisters

Reviewed by Elena Bellaart

A thoughtful meditation on the beauty of ordinary lives  

 The Ballad of Two Sisters follows the lives of sisters Stella and Helen and a cast of characters with whom their stories intersect. These include Stella’s husband Gerald and son Jesse as well as the mortician who, at the end of Stella and Helen’s lives, prepares their bodies for burial. Stella and Helen are the novel’s emotional center; their relationship with one another is the one constant in an otherwise shifting landscape. 

The sisters grow up in and around the Chicago suburbs in the aftermath of World War II, with a father who is violent and emotionally absent and a mother who never recovers from the regret that mars her life. Stella, the elder sister and characterized as the sturdier of the two, is Helen’s childhood protector. 

But when Stella reaches adulthood, she looks outward to escape the emotionally stunted terrain of her family life, going to college before meeting and marrying Gerald and having a child of her own. Helen, meanwhile, turns inward; the victim of childhood sexual abuse, she is distrustful of everyone except Stella and maintains a wary isolation from the world around her.

Though it is initially difficult for Helen to share Stella’s time and attention with her husband and child, the sisters remain constant sources of support for one another throughout their lives. In a particularly moving scene, Stella and Helen travel to Mexico together, determined to avoid the regret of never having seen the world that plagued their mother until her death. Swimming in the ocean, Stella “thought of nothing, not of home, not of her dead mother or troubled son, nor did she think of how age had crept up on her and would only continue to do so. No, she thought only of buoyancy, of air.” The sisters’ relationship is rendered beautifully, as is each of their interior worlds. The novel treats their lives, small and ordinary though they may be, with dignity and reverence. 

While the stories of Stella and Helen make up the bulk of the novel, secondary characters also shine throughout. The character of the Mortician is one such figure, a strange and fascinating man with an aptitude for tending to the dead. We meet the Mortician first, as the opening chapter sees him embalming Stella and Helen, now old women, in preparation for their funeral. The Mortician handles the sisters with a moving tenderness and respect, taking care to understand and honor them as he prepares their bodies for viewing. We soon learn that the Mortician’s care for the dead has caused problems for him in the past, as he has been known to lash out at families who do not treat their lost loved ones with the appropriate love and sorrow. The Mortician is an unusual and incredibly intriguing character, and I would have loved to see even more of him throughout the novel. 

Readers who appreciate stories of family history will thoroughly enjoy this exploration of what it means to live an ordinary and worthwhile life.

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