My Little Sister

Two sisters, one golden and impossible to hold, the other watching from the shadows. In an isolated landscape where childhood stretches endless and the outside world is something to fear, Bettina blooms while her older sister circles like a guardian angel who may be tightening her wings. Their mother, trembling with unnamed anxieties, has taught them that safety lies only in each other and in staying small. But Bettina is beginning to look outward, toward men, toward a life beyond the garden and the house where everything is carefully kept. What follows is a study in the经济学 of love: how protection becomes possession, how the ethereal can trap as surely as the bars of a cage, and how the sister who seemed to need saving may be the one who understands the game all along. Robins writes with unsettling precision about the way families build their own mythology, about the violence wrapped in tenderness, and about what happens when a girl raised to fear the world finally decides to step into it.