Best Books about Siblings or Families

Families make great book fodder: sibling rivalries and love, functional and dysfunctional, family expectations and disloyalty. Being one of four children myself, it is interesting to ponder the interplay between birth order and parental attention. There are so many books that make use of these conflicts but we have chosen the very best books about siblings for this list.

I loved The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin. It is a literary novel based around an intriguing premise – what if you knew the date of your death? How would that affect how you lived? Four siblings go to a fortune teller in 1969 New York and each deal with the knowledge differently and forge their own paths.

Check out my review of The Immortalists

You would have heard of Practical Magic (the Sandra Bullock movie)? The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman is a prequel to this. It is a YA Urban Fantasy and tells the story of the Owens siblings, who are invited to their aunt’s house one summer. They have complete freedom and discover who they are. The magic is a gritty, realistic sort of magic, of herblore and seasons. It is a magic that wraps itself through the world that we know, weaving into our histories and settings seamlessly.

The Secret Keeper by Kate Morton is historical fiction about a family’s secrets. Laurel sees something one day, something that she wasn’t meant to see. Fifty years later, she is a successful actress and she has one last chance to uncover the real story of what happened that day and what her mother did during the war.

One of the books that got me started on historical fiction was The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory. It is based loosely on fact but it makes a great story! When Mary arrives at the French Court, she is a pawn for her family’s ambitious plans for marriage to King Henry VIII. But when her sister, Anne, takes the king’s eye, one of them will have to back down.

I am going to slip in one non-fiction book here. Just because I haven’t talked enough about this one yet (!) Educated is a memoir by Tara Westover of her childhood living in a fundamentalist Mormon household with no birth certificates and no hospitals. It is a gritty story but also a tale of hope, as Tara educates herself about the world she grew up in and we laugh and cry along with every lightbulb moment.

Let’s see what the other book bloggers’ best books about siblings are.

Leslie Conzatti www.upstreamwriter.blogspot.com

Strap in, because I’ve actually read several books that involve siblings and/or extended family!

First we have The Ruby Red Trilogy by Kerstin Gier. It tells the story of Gwyneth, a girl whose family has the remarkable legacy of one woman in each generation receiving a gene that allows them to travel through time. They are closely linked with another family that possesses the same feature, except in that family, it’s one man in every generation who passes on the gene. The two families fell apart the generation immediately prior to Gwyneth, as her aunt, as it were, and uncle uncovered something about the family legacy that led them to disrupt the continuity of the family and abscond with one of the two time-travel devices. Everyone was looking to a cousin of Gwyneth’s to manifest the time travel ability and potentially be able to save them from certain doom–also according to “prophecies” mapped out by the greatest minds of history–but things tilt more than a little sideways when it’s Gwyneth who stumbles from the present day into a past era! I freaking love it. I thought it was going to be a whole lot more “teen smutty” than it actually was!

Another book I’ve read that has at its center a group of siblings is The Little Women Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly. Just like the title says, this novel pays homage to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women as the family are supposedly Jo March’s descendants, a group of four sisters who are trying to make their way in the world. One of them discovers a bundle of letters penned by Jo herself, and the whole book is just a delightful adventure in sibling rivalry, family dynamics, and love between people!

Then, if dark fantasy is more your “thing”, we have the MirrorWorld series by Cornelia Funke. According to the story, Jacob Reckless is a young man who can travel to an alternate fantasy dimension via a particular mirror. The more he interacts with those on the other side, the more he becomes attached and drawn to it, away from the real world. Peril strikes when his brother Will inadvertently follows him through the mirror one day, and the monsters that lurk in the shadows of the Mirrorworld attack him, infecting Will with a dangerous curse that will require all of Jacob’s cunning, strength, and courage to cure! It’s utterly fantastic. I love the way Funke reinvents fantasy!

Lastly, I want to mention an indie author with some books that involve family, and most of all siblings! J. E. Mueller is the name, and she’s written at least 2 books (the 3rd is due out in October!) of a series called the Shaudrey Universe series, and it deals with different characters in a particular kingdom, starting with Key, a young princess who was cursed pretty much as soon as she was born because her father, the King, made a bargain with a demon to succeed in some battle, and promised his unborn child’s soul as collateral. He ends up dying of his wounds on the way home, and Key manifests the ability to manipulate fire. However, since the King didn’t hold up his end of the bargain, the demon he bargained with now wants to collect his due–Key’s soul–so she is forced to go on the run to escape the demon’s minions and figure out how to break the curse upon her.

Key has siblings, at least two brothers (I believe) and a sister–one of the brothers becomes King in his father’s place, and the rest of them have a pretty decent relationship with one another–even though Key is kind of a dangerous person to be around, because of the curse.

She’s also written a modern-day twist on Cinderella called An Unexpected Brew which I haven’t read–but I’ve heard it’s fantastic, and there are definitely siblings in that one!

Jo Linsdell www.JoLinsdell.com

There are a lot of books that fit this category. For this one I’m going with the whole Shepherd series by Ethan Cross though as it’s one of my favourite series. I seriously loved every book. 

This is one messed up family! One brother is one of the worst serial killers in history, one brother is a special agent trying to stop all the bad guys (his brother included), and then in Father of Fear we get a better look at their father who is quite possibly the most evil person ever. 

Robin Taylor https://www.robinlovesreading.com 

Kristy Woodson’s Harvey’s 5 star trilogy – Simply South of Simple, The Secret to Southern Charm and The Southern Side of Paradise.  I loved this series so much! Three sisters all ended up back with their mother at the same time while all at crossroads in their lives.

I hope you read some of these books and let us know what you thought. What are your best books about siblings?