WE BECAME LIKE A HAND: A Story of Five Sisters

Childhood can be a minefield in which siblings often provide the only buffer zone. Elementary school teacher Ortlip details her own minefield experience here in her first book. As the eldest, Ortlip navigated choppy emotional seas: her mother's depression required repeated hospitalization; her father's work frequently took him away from home. When not in the haphazard care of their shell-shocked mother, the five girls—Carol, Kate, Shari, Danielle and Michelle—were left with a series of housekeepers. Ortlip, now nearing 50, describes their formative years in New Jersey as having engendered a protective and succoring bond among the sisters, with each developing a role in the sisterly pentagon. Adolescence and their mother's second marriage to a sexually obsessed therapist who crossed many boundaries with the sisters drove them apart, some as far as Alaska. Tragedy reunited them in 1976, when teenage Shari was killed in a car accident. The late 1980s found the sisters reconnected emotionally, if distanced geographically. But tragedy soon struck again: after a brief but harrowing illness, Danielle died in 1993 from cancer complications. Now the sisters are only three. Ortlip's narrative is often moving, particularly when discussing Danielle's illness and her own struggles with addiction. But the early years are foggy, frequently leaving readers wondering exactly how these compelling bonds formed. Frustratingly, Ortlip raises issues—the strained relationships between the girls and their parents, the sisters' response to Ortlip's lesbianism, the role Shari's death played in their looming adulthood—then drops them, unexplored. Still, those with sisters will find this memoir interesting and even uplifting. Agent, Linda Konner. (Apr.)