Summary: A series of short stories themed around Australian families. I really liked a few; quite liked most and found only one completely weird and hard to read. Not bad odds I'd say for a collection of varied authors.

Things I liked:

The setting: I'm from Australia, most of the stories are set in Australia so the language, architecture situations were all a bit easier to relate to and snugly familiar in some cases.

The characters: My favorite story was 'Blood' (or something like it). I've always liked well written children as characters (they can so easily break my heart). But across the stories the focus is often on the identification of characters and personality and I enjoyed this.

Things I thought could have been improved:

The theme: The book is called 'Brothers and Sisters' but the crux of many of the stories is more generally, family, or 'my life' or (quite often in my opinion) daughters, sons and parents. While the title is catchy I found it a bit misleading.

Standout: The story 'Blood' was beautiful story telling. I really liked it. ( )

I very much enjoyed this collection of short stories about sibling relationships. The diversity of stories in the collection was one of its greatest strengths for me. They encompassed a whole range of relationships, from a whole range of different ages and strata of society, and spoke to a lot of the universal dimensions of such relationships, coming together as a coherent and enjoyable whole ... ( )