Dear Sister
A Memoir of Secrets, Survival, and Unbreakable Bonds
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4.8 • 34 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
AMAZON EDITOR'S PICK FOR BEST BOOKS OF FEBRUARY
A breathtaking memoir about two sisters and a high-profile case: Nikki Addimando, incarcerated for killing her longtime abuser; and the author, Michelle Horton, left in the devastating fall-out to raise Nikki's young children and to battle the criminal justice system.
In September 2017, a knock on the door from police upends Michelle Horton’s life forever: her sister had just shot her partner and was now in jail. Everything Michelle thought she knew about her family unraveled in that moment. During the investigation that follows, Michelle learns that Nikki had been hiding horrific abuse for years.
Stunned to find herself in a situation she’d only ever encountered on television and true crime podcasts, Michelle rearranges her life to care for Nikki's children and simultaneously launches a fight to bring Nikki home, squaring off against a criminal justice system seemingly designed to punish the entire family.
In this exquisite memoir, Michelle retraces the sisters’ childhood and explores how so many people, including herself, could have been blind to the abuse. An intimate look at a family surviving trauma, Dear Sister is a deeply personal story about what it takes to be believed and the danger of keeping truths hidden. Ultimately, Horton turns her family’s suffering into hard won wisdom: a profound story of resilience and the unbreakable bond between sisters.
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Horton's incendiary debut catalogs her efforts to get her sister released from prison. In 2017, Horton was stunned to learn that her younger sibling, Nikki Addimando, had been arrested by police in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for fatally shooting her boyfriend, Chris Grover, with his own gun. During a phone call with Horton following the arrest, Addimando admitted to the killing, claiming Grover had brandished the firearm and threatened to kill her first. She also revealed to Horton that Grover had been brutally abusing her for years, including while she was pregnant with their daughter, Faye. Despite ample evidence of Grover's abuse, Addimando was convicted of second-degree murder in 2019 and sentenced to 19 years in prison (reduced to 7.5 years in 2021 under the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act). Horton recounts her desperate attempts to convince the prosecutor not to pursue the case and the toll it took on her own son, Noah, when she assumed responsibility for Addimando's two children. With Addimando still behind bars, Horton's narrative offers little comfort, but it serves as a powerful testament to the tenacity of sisterly bonds, a scathing indictment of the legal landscape for abused women, and a wrenching exploration of the shame that allows abuse to remain hidden. This is difficult to forget.
