Bereft: A Sister's Story

This is a beautifully written story of terrible, searing grief that the author suffered for years and years after the stabbing death of her sister while attending college.......The author stiffled her feelings, as taught so well by her parents, until she felt herself coming apart at the seams and knew she had to deal with it. The book is heart-breaking and wrenching, but I couldn't put it down because it is written with such honesty that I felt a friend was talking to me. The mystery of the murder is inconsequential, but has to be known before the author can know herself, so the book is part true crime and part gut-wrenching honesty. The book reminds me of Change Me Into Zeus' Daughter by Barbara Robinette Moss. I believe Moss is, like this author, a writing professor, and this is why these books can tell of such harrowing experiences in such a beautiful way. Thanks to the author for this book. It is important for all of us to remember that trauma has to be dealt with or it will haunt us forever........

I was very moved by Jane's story and I haven't been able to stop thinking about BEREFT. She writes beautifully and intelligently. Back in the 60's my older brother was killed in a car accident. Like Jane's family we never talked about it. Even today almost forty years later, we don't mention my brother in front of my mother. I wonder how this has effected my life? After reading this book, I hope to explore my own past and find out some answers.

It took a senseless murder and 20 years for one of the "pretend it didn't happen" generation to write the definitive expose of the damage caused by this popular parental adage. It was hard for Martha Bernstein to supress any response to her beloved older sister's murder; so hard she had to change her name to Jane, and in effect reinvent herself. The new Jane is tough, competent, smart. She also is way too successful in pretending away the other problems in her life, including her charming husband's violent rages. On the other hand, she knows instinctively that something is scewed. She resolutely untangles the strands of her life to come to an understanding of what she has lost. In so doing, she becomes a complete person.

An insightful personal journey in which the author brilliantly conveys how, in the course of investigating her older sister's murder, she discovers her own repressed feelings about the senseless death, while at the same time attempting to extricate herself from her marriage with a loving, but volatile man. The book is beautifully written in a style which conveys not only the author's personal issues but also allows the reader to ponder such thought provoking universal issues as death, love, family, revenge, grief and rage.

Beautifully written, brilliantly conceived, this is an extraordinary portrait of a woman grappling with herself, her sister's murder, and all the unresolved losses of her life. Insightful, heartbreaking, unforgettable.