The Three Incestuous Sisters

I don’t really like the title of this visual novel by Audrey Niffenegger. It’s not the kind of thing you want sitting on your shelf, when the actual book itself is something I feel proud to own – proud, because it was selling for sixty bucks and I got it for a fraction of the price. It’s a beautiful concrete piece of artistry, something real and solid in a way that an ordinary book isn’t. It’s filled with amazing artwork (it took her 14 years to create) and a very simple storyline. It’s a fairytale, albeit a dark and twisted one, and so there does have to be three sisters in it. They’re not incestuous however, and you feel she chose the title for its sensational nature.

The three sisters are divided by a man, one who loves, one who is rejected, one who is tormented by possibility. There’s strange magic at work and there’s ordinary love and extraordinary bitterness. The end reminds me of a Margaret Mahy story about a trapeze artist and a forest or the Jostein Gaarder story about the lost little girl who is found. It’s messy and very, very weird, but it’s really beautiful and different, which is why I like it.