Sisters Who Slay Together

By Carly KocurekMay 31, 2015

Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce

IN THE OPENING vignette of Jackson Pearce’s Sisters Red, Scarlett is 11, Rosie is 9, and there is a wolf at the gate. The book is the first in Pearce’s series of fairytale retellings, and it begins with a surprise: Little Red is not a single young girl, but a pair of sisters, orphaned by a monstrous werewolf. The Fenris, as the wolves are called, comes to their gate hawking citrus fruit, then kills the sisters’ beloved grandmother and takes out one of Scarlett’s eyes. Though at first she wields only a popsicle stick as she steps between her little sister and the Fenris, Scarlett kills him with a jagged piece of mirror before the chapter is done.


In the wake of all this, the sisters become Fenris hunters, devoted to the extinction of the evil creatures who killed their grandmother and scarred their lives. As a pair, they offer two versions of the protagonist of the familiar fairy tale. In Scarlett, we have the Little Red who might have saved herself with knife, hatchet, and flame, and, in Rosie, the Little Red who might have fallen into the woodsman’s arms in romantic soft focus.


The story cuts forward to Scarlett and Rosie’s shared life alone in their grandmother’s cottage where they hunt wolves and dodge social services, pawning the contents of the house to survive. Scarlett wears an eye patch and carefully hides her viciously scarred skin as she hunts Fenris, while Rosie grows frustrated by her sister’s tendency to exclude her from these solo hunts. The sisters are a study in contrasts — one beautiful, one scarred, one cynical, the other a hopeless romantic — but they are also two halves of a single pulsing heart. As Scarlett and Rosie struggle to redefine themselves not as halves, but as two distinct wholes, they offer readers a compelling vision of what it means to separate from obvious sources of support and identification in the pursuit of a satisfying life.


By necessity, the sisters are isolated from the world around them. At one point, Rosie, gone to town to buy medical gauze and groceries, eavesdrops on a group of former classmates picking out nail polish for a high-school dance; she grows wistful, longing for the ease and frivolity that mark these girls’ lives. Like Scarlett, she bears the weight of protecting the glittering, lovely young women whom Scarlett dismissively calls “dragonfly girls” from the horrors of the looming monsters that prey on them.


The sisters believe they have a moral obligation to hunt, but their childhood friend and neighbor Silas Reynolds feels no such obligation. Although he and Scarlett trained together as hunters under the tutelage of Silas’s father, the woodsman Pa Reynolds, and hunted as partners for several years, Silas feels little guilt about leaving Ellison, a small town outside of Atlanta, to spend a year in San Francisco, doing anything but hunting. When Silas returns, amidst an increase of Fenris activity and growing tension between Scarlett and Rosie, the true action of Sisters Red begins.


Scarlett, Silas, and Rosie note a growing number of suspicious murders in Atlanta, and, after killing a Fenris in the midst of an Ellison apple festival, decide to go to the city. If the world beyond the woods is safe in the more traditional, medieval versions of the Little Red Riding Hood tale, in Sisters Red no place is safe; the woods and urban Atlanta both are rife with wolves.


In the city, Scarlett becomes increasingly obsessed with hunting and spends her days poring over public records and newspapers at the library, trying to find some way of identifying the men capable of being turned into Fenris. Meanwhile, Silas convinces Rosie to sign up for classes at a community arts center near the apartment where the hunting party has set up its base, and he challenges Scarlett to sparring matches with a night off as the stakes. As Rosie and Silas surreptitiously develop first a flirtation and then a full-blown affair, Rosie finds herself torn between her growing desire for a life outside of hunting and her deep obligation to Scarlett. As the story further unfolds, the sisters and Silas find that the wolves are not merely snatching up dragonfly girls outside nightclubs, they are working together to capture a potential Fenris — a rare occasion as the capacity to become a Fenris is unknown, and the hunters spend a great deal of time attempting to understand the intricacies of Fenris reproduction. As the wolf hunt reaches its peak, Rosie is attacked by a Fenris in a tango class, and the trio encounters an entire pack at a bowling alley where they wind up in a harrowing showdown with an alpha.


At the crux of Sisters Red is a series of questions about self-determination. Rosie longs for a life of her own, even while coming to the realization that Scarlett’s diligence in hunting is far from pathological. She comes to see her sister as “an artist with a hatchet,” someone driven not so much by obsession as by passion and talent, and thereby recognizes Scarlett’s own identity — one that is independent from her own, even as they remain sisters. The trauma that has physically scarred Scarlett has, in fact, shaped both young women. While Scarlett wishes to see herself as Rosie’s other half and protector, she must relax her grip on her sister in order for both to have the lives best suited to their individual needs and desires. That first fateful encounter with a Fenris disrupts Rosie’s and Scarlett’s lives, but it also binds them tightly together. A loosening of that bond is essential for growth; Silas’s break from his family is a source of discord but is similarly essential to his coming of age.


Pearce’s presentation of trauma is richly layered. It leaves behind the real scars that Scarlett carries as reminders, but also marks the characters deeply — not only Rosie and Scarlett, but Silas and his family, too — inviting them to arrange their entire lives around a trauma that serves as origin story and full explanation. It is the struggle against this compact sense of self that motivates Silas’s escape to California and Rosie’s tango lesson. Rosie and Scarlett come to represent two radically different, if equally valid, approaches to being Little Red, of acquiring the knowledge they will need to live as young women when simply being a young woman can be fraught with danger. Scarlett finds satisfaction in vengeance and the hunt, which focuses her life, just as Rosie, ultimately, decides that she wants something more. She does not wish to ignore her knowledge of the Fenris so much as to cast her focus elsewhere. Ultimately, Sisters Red has much to say about obligation and family tradition and what it means to break free. More importantly, it also has much to say about trauma and what it feels like to come of age as a woman in a world where there are forever wolves at the gate.


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Carly A. Kocurek is an assistant professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

LARB Contributor

Carly A. Kocurek is an assistant professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her book, Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade, examines the cultural history of coin-op video games and the emergence of gaming culture, and she is co-editor and co-founder of the Influential Game Designers book series published by Bloomsbury. Her work has appeared in journals such as Game StudiesVisual Studies, and The Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds as well as in outlets such as The Atlantic and Ms

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