Books: Her Sister's Keeper

Olivia Hunt, 34, is a loser. She lost her job at Universal Studios after the movie she worked on--Lloyd, the Hamster--flopped at the box office. Her dream project, a film adaptation of Don Quixote, is going nowhere. Her boyfriend Michael recently bailed on her. And she just noticed a mustache hair on her upper lip. "Jimmy Stewart," she writes to a friend, "had a helluva lot more to live for when he tried to off himself in It's a Wonderful Life."

And that's before she gets the bad news: her younger sister Madeleine, who has everything to live for, has leukemia. That's the setup in Elisabeth Robinson's The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters, a novel that's likely to be the first pleasant literary surprise of 2004. Robinson wisely chooses to tell Olivia's story through her letters and e-mail, allowing her to shift with unnerving speed from hilarious satire--in letters to Robin Williams and Danny DeVito begging them to look at scripts--to devastatingly painful accounts of Madeleine's decline. Robinson does both with the sad, sweet voice of experience, having been around the Hollywood track a few times--she has a producing credit on Braveheart--and having seen her sister through a terminal illness. "All your life you try to imagine what bad news sounds like," she writes, "but when you actually hear bad news, it simply makes no sense; it's like being told the definition of a black hole by a physicist, directions by a local, the evidence of God by a priest." Tough, tender and tearful, Hunt Sisters helps us make sense of it all. --By Lev Grossman