Sleep, Pale Sister (P.S.) | 
 enlarge | Author: Joanne Harris
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Category: Book
List Price: $13.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 172658
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 0060787112
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780060787110
ASIN: 0060787112
Publication Date: September 1, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Before the sweet delight of Chocolat, before the heady concoction that is Blackberry Wine, and before the tart pleasures of Five Quarters of the Orange, bestselling author Joanne Harris wrote Sleep, Pale Sister -- a gothic tourde-force that recalls the powerfully dark sensibility of her novel Holy Fools. Originally published in 1994 -- and never before available in the United States -- Sleep, Pale Sister is a hypnotically atmospheric story set in nineteenth century London. When puritanical artist Henry Chester sees delicate child beauty Effie, he makes her his favorite model and, before long, his bride. But Henry, volatile and repressed, is in love with an ideal. Passive, docile, and asexual, the woman he projects onto Effie is far from the woman she really is. And when Effie begins to discover the murderous depths of Henry's hypocrisy, her latent passion will rise to the surface. Sleep, Pale Sister combines the ethereal beauty of a Pre-Raphaelite painting with a chilling high gothic tale and is a testament to Harris's brimming cornucopia of talents. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Unexpected Joy October 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Sleep, Pale Sister / 0-06-078711-2
This is a spectacular read from an incredible novelist. Make no mistake about it: this is not just a great novel, this is a great Harris novel, which is a much higher bar to set.
"Sleep, Pale Sister" grabs you from the first page and never lets go. As you are dragged through the lives of one pale victim and her three persecutors, you are shown by turns the motivations and inner thoughts of her tormentors, by the careful, compelling switches between narrative viewpoint. This is one of the hardest tricks to pull off in novels, yet Harris manages to make it look effortless. Each tormentor addresses themselves to us, explains their motives, their thoughts, urges that their view is the right one, the sane one, the correct one. As each villain "loves" our poor victim into the grave, we are touched with the deep sadness of the cruelties we can inflict on one another in our own deep selfishness.
From the husband who hates his wife for being human, female, and an adult, and who punishes her for her own good to remove the sin from her; from the lover who hates his darling for being strong when he desires weakness and weak when he desires strength, and who torments her to break her spirit and satisfy his own desires; to the distraught mother who is so anxious to see her dead daughter again that she will hypnotize, drug, and abuse a sweet, lost stranger in an attempt to regain what she has lost... and engineer a terrible revenge.
Deeper and darker than other Harris novels, "Sleep, Pale Sister" offers no hope - only a painful, terrifying look at how even the 'normal' amongst us can become so consumed with our own desires and pain that we become willing to inflict pain on innocent bystanders, even convincing ourselves in our enthusiasm that we are "helping", when in fact we are destroying their life, their mind, and their heart. I highly recommend this novel as a gripping, terrifying read.
(My only complaint with this novel - and other Harris works - is that her interpretation of the Tarot is completely different from the one I have been taught. This makes for some confusing reading at times. Example, she seems to associate The Hermit with dark, unpleasant secrets and desires - she has used the card here and in "Chocolat" to identify murderers. However, to me and my teachers, The Hermit is a card of withdrawal, healing, and inner study. Another example, The Hanged/Hanging Man is frequently mistaken as a bad card - after all, being hanged to death is no fun, no? Yet, The Hanging Man is not hanged by his neck to die (as in Harris novels, like this one) - he is hanging upside down from a tree as a child would, by his legs, looking at the world from a new and different perspective. However, Harris almost always considers it, and its partner Death (a card of change and new beginnings, and not of actual death) as bad, evil omens. These misinterpretations are frequently seen among people new to the Tarot, who take the meanings literally (e.g. Death) without understanding the symbolic message. Surely, however, Harris is no novice, so I can only assume that she is working with some different tradition. I also simply do not understand her use of The Star in this novel - The Star is a card of quiet healing, but here it is a card of miscarriage and trauma, and I'm not sure why. The fact that Harris uses a different interpretation of the Tarot did not in any way detract from the novel for me, but it is worth mentioning that novices may be confused by the usage here.)
Engrossing Fantasy June 26, 2007
I must say, this was one of the best books I've read in a long time. It starts off like a typical historical novel, but soon the story has you enmeshed with more twists and alternate realities! The story was a true cloud of drug induced confusion, and it is a refreshing change from so many novels published today. Plus, the story line is never predictable. I highly recommend this book!
"I want to keep you innocent. I want to keep you beautiful." January 27, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
What seems at first a man's Svengali-like obsession with a pure young woman and another man's seduction that female proves to be but a part of a clever plot that twists and turns in unexpected ways, producing a darkly gothic ambiance that reeks of menace. At the center of everyone's fascination is the ethereal Effie, a frail girl with streaming white-blonde hair, who becomes the singular model for artist Henry Paul Chester. In the Victorian fashion, Chester makes clear moral distinctions, his life well-ordered and constricted by society's tenets, his considerable dark side kept well-disguised. Many years her senior, Chester marries the unassuming Effie, but struggles to maintain the ideal of purity with his wife, exorcised when she turns to him with passion on their wedding night. Repulsed, Chester believes his wife is tainted, ruined beneath the surface of her innocence. To assuage his own needs, Chester frequents a local bawdy house, where he is consistently drawn to a nubile virgin, Marti, provided by the madam, Fanny Miller.
Determined to maintain the facade he requires for emotional equilibrium, Chester doses his wife liberally with laudanum to assure her compliance with his wishes and shelter her from the outside world. Henry has a showing to introduce his work to the public; into this venue steps a roue, Moses Zachary Harper, who is immediately fascinated by Effie, her shy modesty a drug to his jaded senses. Much to Moses' surprise, his seduction is eagerly embraced, Effie desperate to taste the forbidden fruit he offers, her young life circumscribed by Chester's rigid control. Even Moses is out of his depth, anticipating a short, satisfying dalliance, but pulled into an erotic affair that both exceeds his expectations and frustrates his natural inclination to dominate. Manipulating behind the scenes is Fanny Miller, who has plans of her own for Effie and Moses, among them a long-awaited revenge that will not be denied. Once Effie is introduced to Fannie, the die is cast.
What ensues is a complicated brew of obsession, revenge, guilt and the loss of innocence, all laced with increasing draughts of laudanum and chloral hydrate. While Effie drifts through her days and deceptive nights in a drug-filled fugue, Henry is beset with guilt and increasing paranoia, relieved only by furtive doses of chloral hydrate. Fantasy and reality merge as the final act begins, the tortured souls tearing at one another with artifice and deception. In true gothic fashion, the pages are laced with evil intentions, even Effie unrecognizable in the hands of a master. A pawn to Henry, Moses and Fanny, Effie is the key to all, the coin of a terrible misdeed. Henry, the dark master, is ultimately destroyed by his damaged soul, dissembling to the end to avoid the consequences of his sick and twisted existence. Harris defines the powerful subconscious of her characters, a murky underworld of sexual dysfunction and the callous destruction of a defenseless young woman. In true Victorian fashion, the morality play self-destructs, hurling the protagonists into their just rewards. Luan Gaines/2007.
A Wonderfully Ethereal Novel January 6, 2007
Effie is a child muse to painter Henry Chester, a religiously devout, yet unpiously checkered man who takes her as his wife and molds her into his pure, innocent, flawless, and unsensual doll of a woman. Growing up in the dysfunctional bubble of Henry's existence, Effie is instructed to quell all creative endeavors, intellectual or otherwise in the name of what is the right and "proper" way for a woman to behave. All the while she is in a laudanum-induced fog forced upon her by her hysteric husband. It is only when Effie is encountered by the sly, womanizing sweet-talker Mose and the sensual, independent Fanny Miller that she begins to realize the extent of her own passion and the extremity of her current, suffocating oppression. Their presence in the novel serves as a catalyst to her escape from her "lap dog" lifestyle and the beginning of her stand against her increasingly unstable husband. Between the painfully growing tension and the mysterious and intriguing laudanum-induced haze, the ambience throughout the novel's course is ethereal, leaving readers feelings as if they too are under the drug's spell.
 Didn't like it at all July 31, 2006
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
All that one can say about this book is that it's "Gothic". Yeah, right. Here are ghosts, witches, mad wives in the attic, black cats and other mandatory attributes. But probably, "gothic" decorations are not enough for a book, there should be something else. Something that I failed to find. The novel is tedious and empty. A weak attempt to create a thriller rather failed, the plot is hardly glued together, the episodes that are probably supposed to scare remind a bad horror movie that is full of dark rooms, ominous music and crazy screams, but simply does not frighten, period.
I finished the book, but it was a waste of time. If you want a good thriller by Joanne Harris, read her "Gentlemen and players" instead.
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