Sisters - Whether by Blood or by Fate
There is a particular kind of love story that does not get nearly enough credit — the one between women. Not romantic, not always easy, not always free of jealousy or betrayal or the kind of silence that stretches too long. But the love that exists between sisters — biological or chosen — is one of the most enduring subjects in all of literature, and this week we are giving it the full feature it deserves.
This week in The Mojito Reader: a feature devoted to the women who love each other through secrets, rivalry, distance, and time. We are revisiting two previously published videos and building toward Thursday’s lead book with everything the theme demands. Pour something strong. This one gets into it.
The Women Who Shape Us: A Feature on Sisters, Chosen and Otherwise
The sisterhood story takes many forms. There is the biological sister who knows exactly which words will land hardest and uses them anyway — and then calls the next morning as if nothing happened. There is the best friend who becomes family through sheer accumulated loyalty, the rival who pushes you toward your best self precisely because you cannot stand to let her win, and the stranger who becomes chosen kin in the middle of a crisis neither of you planned for.
What all of these relationships share is an intimacy that is almost impossible to fake on the page. The best books about women and their bonds — the ones that stay with you — understand that love between women is rarely simple and rarely stated plainly. It lives in gestures, in shared history, in the things left unsaid across decades. It survives jealousy. It survives secrets. It sometimes does not survive at all, and even then it leaves a mark.
The books and videos in this week’s feature cover that entire spectrum — from the bonds forged in the worst possible circumstances to the ones strained nearly to breaking by the ordinary wounds of family life, to the incandescent, dangerous, necessary friendship that lights up two girls who have nothing to lose.
Revisited Video: The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück by Lynne Olson
We are bringing back our video discussion of The Sisterhood of Ravensbrück by Lynne Olson — a book that demonstrates, with shattering clarity, what women can build for each other when everything else has been taken away.
The Story
Ravensbrück was Nazi Germany’s only all-female concentration camp, and its name still carries the weight of the atrocities committed there — including brutal medical experiments performed on prisoners. What Lynne Olson’s meticulous, luminous work of narrative nonfiction uncovers is something the history books largely overlooked: the extraordinary network of solidarity that a group of French female Resistance members built inside those walls.
These women — political prisoners, intellectuals, fighters — formed bonds that allowed them not only to survive but to resist. They shared food, protected one another during roll calls, smuggled information, supported the sick, and documented what was happening around them with the full understanding that the world might one day need to know. One prisoner made secret illustrations inside the camp. Those images survive.
After liberation, these women did something equally remarkable: they refused to let the world move on. At a moment when postwar Europe was exhausted and eager to forget, they organized, testified, and demanded accountability. They were largely ignored. Olson’s book makes sure that changes.
Why It Belongs in This Feature
The sisterhood in this book is not metaphorical. These women chose each other under conditions designed to make solidarity impossible, and they held. The bond between them is not warm and uncomplicated — it is hard-won, tested daily, and built on something closer to necessity than sentiment. That, we would argue, is what makes it the purest expression of what this feature is about. Chosen sisters, under the most extreme circumstances imaginable, choosing each other again and again.
Revisited Video: Where Wild Peaches Grow by Cade Bentley
From one of the most extreme bonds this feature could offer, we turn to one of the most recognizable: the estranged sisters of Where Wild Peaches Grow by Cade Bentley, a novel set deep in the American South that understands exactly how much damage a family can do — and exactly how much it can still hold.
Why It Belongs in This Feature
The sisterhood in this book is not metaphorical. These women chose each other under conditions designed to make solidarity impossible, and they held. The bond between them is not warm and uncomplicated — it is hard-won, tested daily, and built on something closer to necessity than sentiment. That, we would argue, is what makes it the purest expression of what this feature is about. Chosen sisters, under the most extreme circumstances imaginable, choosing each other again and again.
Revisited Video: Where Wild Peaches Grow by Cade Bentley
From one of the most extreme bonds this feature could offer, we turn to one of the most recognizable: the estranged sisters of Where Wild Peaches Grow by Cade Bentley, a novel set deep in the American South that understands exactly how much damage a family can do — and exactly how much it can still hold.
This is the book for anyone who has ever loved someone they also resented, or resented someone they also loved. Which is to say: this book is for most of us.
More Books About the Women Who Shape Us
If this week’s theme is speaking to you, here are a few more titles that belong in any serious sisterhood reading list:
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng — the friendship and rivalry between two mothers that consumes an entire community. A quiet masterpiece about the ways women love and destroy each other across lines of class, race, and ambition.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — not strictly about sisters, but the female friendships and chosen bonds that sustain Ifemelu across continents are among the most honestly rendered in contemporary fiction.
The Girls by Emma Cline — a novel about the terrifying pull of older girls on younger ones, and what it means to be chosen by someone you worship. Unsettling, precise, and unforgettable.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee — spans four generations, but the bonds between the women across those generations — the things they pass down, including their silences — are the architecture of the entire novel.
Book Lovers by Emily Henry — the sisters at the center of this novel (Nora and Libby) are one of Henry’s warmest and most fully realized relationships. A lighter entry on this list, but the sister bond is the whole point.
Did You Know? Honey Bee Fun Fact
Honey bees can count — and scientists have been quietly astonished by it for years. Research from RMIT University in Melbourne found that bees can distinguish between different quantities, reliably telling the difference between two and three objects, and with training, between three and four. They understand the concept of more and less, and in one remarkable experiment, when bees trained on the concept of “less” were shown a card with zero symbols — something they had never been taught — they chose it immediately, correctly placing zero at the bottom of the number line. Nobody told them zero was a number. They figured it out.
What makes this genuinely astonishing is that a honey bee has fewer than one million neurons. A human brain has roughly 86 billion. And yet, with that fraction of the hardware, the bee can perform a version of numerical discrimination that researchers once assumed required advanced cognition, language, and culture to develop. As lead researcher Dr. Scarlett Howard put it, this tells us that the ability to count may not be something uniquely human at all — it may be far more widespread in the living world than we ever imagined.
A new bee fact every Tuesday and in August. Pass them along.
Coming This Thursday: Hello Girls by Emily Henry and Brittany Cavallaro
Thursday’s lead book brings this week’s theme to a roaring, road-trip-ready close. Hello Girls, co-written by Emily Henry and Brittany Cavallaro, is the chosen sisterhood story at its most electric — a YA novel that has been called a Thelma and Louise for a new generation, and earns that comparison on every page.
Winona and Lucille could not look more different from the outside. Winona lives in a beautiful home with her celebrity weatherman father — a man the whole town adores and who has spent years controlling her eating and hiding his violence behind a perfect public image. Lucille has been holding her struggling family together since she was old enough to work, disappearing into the role of caretaker with no clear exit.
On one night when everything becomes too much, the two girls run. What follows is a road trip that is funny, furious, frightening, and profoundly tender — a story about what it means to be seen by someone who has no reason to be loyal to you except that she chose to be.
We will have the full feature Thursday, along with a conversation about co-authorship, what this book meant when it was published in 2019, and why it still matters now. See you then.
The Mojito Reader · Book Reviews, Book Club Chats & Literary Escapes ·
Published Every Tuesday and Thursday
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