Published in 2025
236 pages
Laura Venita Green is a writer and translator with an MFA from Columbia University, where she was an undergraduate teaching fellow. Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize, received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, and appears in The Missouri Review, Story, Joyland, Fatal Flaw, and translated to Italian in Spazinclusi. Her translations appear in World Literature Today and The Apple Valley Review. Born in San Angelo, TX, she’s lived in New Orleans and now lives with her husband in New York City. Sister Creatures is her debut novel.
What is this book about?
“Captivating and sublime… and centered on a cast of women bound to their roots in unexpected ways, this is a book that interchanges the tender and the cruel, the weird and the real, with breathtaking ease.” –Jinwoo Chong, author of I Leave It Up to You
In the muggy, insect-ridden town of Pinecreek, Louisiana, college dropout Tess Lavigne is watching two bickering siblings while their parents are away. Her listless day drinking is interrupted when someone emerges from the woods behind the house. Filthy and feral, the daughter of religious fundamentalists, the girl known in town as Sister Gail convinces Tess to take her in for the night. The strange events of that evening will set the course for Tess’s future, and Sister Gail’s ultimate fate.
Meanwhile, other residents of Pinecreek try to cobble together a future from what little they have, their lives intersecting in small and not-so-small ways. Sisters fight to define independence for themselves (and from each other), while two young women on a bicycling trip wonder what their relationship promises, or threatens. Throughout, a deeply unsettling presence connects the characters to the buried secrets of Pinecreek: the ominous Thea, a malevolent shape-shifting entity whose rage and despair stems from a tragic history of misogyny, maternal loss, and stolen ambitions.
As time marches forward, so does Tess, creating a new path for herself while accepting what can never be entirely left behind. At times atmospheric and eerie, and at others all too real, Sister Creatures is about manufacturing resilience from nothing but the bonds that tie us together.
