Curtis Smith’s (step)sisters Finds Hope in a City Under Strain

For Kiley, hope isn’t a grand promise. It’s the possibility of making an ordinary life with Nora, the half-sister she loves fiercely. Curtis Smith’s (step)sisters, published by Trompe l’Oeil Press, follows the pair through a strained Philadelphia, where a sanitation workers’ strike and a rat infestation sharpen the pressures of daily survival. The novel’s strongest thread is the bond between its sisters: practical, complicated and chosen anew in the face of uncertainty.

Kiley and Nora clean offices after their occupants have gone home, but their wages can’t fund the independent future they want. To build a small business, they take side jobs carrying illicit substances to Atlantic City. They see the work as temporary, a way to gather start-up money and move on. Kiley’s commitment, though, has roots deeper than their plan. She says she’s there because she believes in Nora’s scheme, then admits the more decisive reason: “I love her more than reason and sound judgement and all the scoldings of my better angels.”

That devotion gives the novel its emotional center. Kiley tends to turn inward and examine what she sees; Nora is more outgoing and quicker to flare. Their differences make them an effective pair, but their trust is what makes the relationship feel like sisterhood. Smith is interested in family as a lived alliance, built through loyalty and shared risk as much as through kinship.

Work, observation and unease

The book is told across sixty short chapters, with abrupt cuts that give some scenes a cinematic pace. Smith moves between Kiley’s private thoughts and the hazards around her, allowing suspense to arrive in sharp bursts. An early encounter with a highway trooper is tense enough to make the reviewer, Charles Holdefer, pause reading and walk around the room. That tension sits alongside close attention to routine: the sisters’ work, their routes through the city and the spaces where other people’s lives leave traces.

At the financial firm where Kiley and Nora clean, Kiley knows the small arrangements at each desk: the reminders on computer screens, the carefully placed staplers, the framed photographs of weddings, holidays and children. In the quiet after the day shift, the vacuum’s hum gives her time to look. She belongs to the rooms through familiarity, even as she remains outside the status and salaries of the people who work there during the day.

Kiley’s view of the firm also complicates the dividing line between respectable employment and illicit work. The office’s flow of money and its deals with oligarchs strike her as part of a network “as dirty as our runs to Atlantic City.” Her observation doesn’t erase the differences between the sisters’ precarious circumstances and the power of the people upstairs. Instead, it reveals how closely their lives sit beside systems they can see but can’t control.

A change in circumstances takes Kiley to a job at the Academy of Natural Sciences, where she starts by unpacking boxes. The work may seem modest, especially given her lack of formal training, but the Academy becomes another place where she can think and observe. Looking at a diorama of mountain sheep balanced on narrow ledges, she wonders whether wanting nothing feels peaceful or empty, and whether the animals are any less alive than she is. The scene gives her uncertainty room to breathe; Smith doesn’t force it into an easy lesson.

What kind of hope can survive?

The novel’s spiritual questions share space with immediate material concerns. Rats are a tangible neighborhood problem, yet their presence also prompts a wider reckoning with the stories people tell about their society. Holdefer connects the book’s use of rats with Albert Camus’ The Plague, where the animals likewise unsettle assumptions about human order and security.

In Smith’s Philadelphia, a figure named Miller turns the infestation into a story of “Us and Them.” His followers attack encampments where homeless people and people struggling with addiction have gathered, presenting their actions as a defense of “right and wrong.” The novel shows how anger can be turned into a shared language, and how threatening that language feels to Kiley and Nora, particularly when men wield it.

Kiley’s memory of her former boyfriend Hank gives this menace an intimate history. She recalls listening to him and his friends grow uglier with each beer, caught up in allegiance to their sports teams, talk-radio fury and the belief that they had been cheated. What lingers for her is not a single argument but the pattern of resentment and meanness that made leaving feel necessary.

Holdefer reads Kiley’s outlook as that of someone for whom the optimism and ease associated with an older generation feel out of reach. In her world, “ordinariness feels like a miracle,” and hope itself is a luxury. That perspective gives the book’s quieter moments their force: a clean office at night or an animal diorama can’t solve Kiley’s problems, but each offers a place to consider what a life might mean beyond getting through the next day.

Smith also avoids reducing Kiley’s experience to one setting or social circle. She moves among the strained neighborhood, the Academy’s intellectual world and the financial firm’s wealth, carrying each into her understanding of the others. The result is a character shaped by overlapping realities rather than confined to a single story about hardship.

(step)sisters offers no tidy answer to the sisters’ troubles. Its generosity lies in taking their alertness, humor and loyalty seriously while refusing to confuse uncertainty with hopelessness. For readers drawn to character-driven fiction and searching portrayals of family, Smith’s novel makes a persuasive case that hope can begin with the person beside you—and with the hard, ordinary work of trying to build something together.

Charles Holdefer’s next novel, Move the Mountain, will be published in April 2027.