California Sister

Moral dilemmas crash into fierce, sisterly love. Claire Waters, an Italian mystery writer living in Los Angeles, rushes to Italy after her older sister's devastating brain-hemorrhage, determined to restore her health-or help her die with dignity. Claire is a gritty decision-maker, a lone wolf who values freedom above all else. Her sister, Ondina-now on the edge of death or living a severely limited life-is wise, cautious, and sociable. They may be different, but have remained close despite the distance. Claire is faced with a dilemma impossible to solve. Would her non-verbal sister want to go on struggling, damaged as she is, or end her suffering? How can anybody know what's best for others? The author, just like her fictional main character, Claire, dropped her entire life in Los Angeles, flew across the ocean and spent nearly three years moving between hospitals and rehabilitation clinics in Italy. She tried everything in her power to help her sister. And then came home and turned the most painful experience of her life into art because she believed it could help other people facing the same impossible choices. She couldn't write a memoir because any time she tried, she broke down. So, she wrote a novel because fiction was the only way she could get trhough it: "Fiction gave me the distance to write more objectively. It allowed me to give my silent sister her voice back, getting into her head and letting her express what I felt she would have said if she could."

And yet, her writing isn't just objective and informative enough to satisfy someone who studies consciousness for a living as a neuroscientist at UCLA. It's also emotionally charged and lyrical, leaving readers "breathless" or "feeling like the story pulled at my heart strings over and over", writing that "this book helped me relieve the pain of powerlessly witnessing my mom slowly dying", and a bookstagrammer telling to read it "if you have a sister you'd move mountains for." Readers didn't leave impersonal, polite reviews. They left confessions. They told about their own sisters, their own daughters, their own mothers and the impossible hospital decisions they had to face on their own. After reading it, they felt the urge to sit down and write their wills.

The book, that spans about both countries and both cultures telling what happens when an immigrant's life in America collides with obligations toward the family she left behind in the old country, won the 2024 Independent Press Award for Grief Fiction, the 2022 Indie Today Award for Best Contemporary Fiction, the Firebird Book Awards twice, and more. It was a finalist for the American Writing Awards and two-time finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. It was chosen and discussed by dozens of book clubs across the nation interested in grief and sisterhood fiction, right-to-die ethics, caregiver sacrifice and burnout, crashed by the moral weight of deciding what's best for others who can no longer speak for themselves.

Barbara Conrey, a USA Today Bestselling author, said "this book will force you to think hard about who has the right to choose." Midwest Book Review marked it as "highly recommended."