Robin Benway’s novel A Year to the Day is a love letter to sisters. The novel starts on the one year anniversary of the car accident that killed Nina, Eleonora aka Leo’s older sister. Leo and Nina’s boyfriend East were also in the car when they were struck by a drunk driver. Leo doesn’t remember what happened, not really.

Benway takes an unusual route to tell the story by working backwards from the one year anniversary to the day before the accident and it’s an effective structure to let us see how grief permeates the lives of the people in Nina’s life and also how time really does offer some modicum of relief. On the one year anniversary of Nina’s death, Leo thinks

about how sometimes things are gone, just like that, even as their absence still takes up space in your heart, their place carved out forever, reminding you of what has been and what will never be again.

Leo’s mother lives in a little cocoon of grief, where she watches HGTV and doesn’t always wash her hair. Leo feels like ‘that girl’, all eyes on her as she attends school. Her father and his new wife, Stephanie, are expecting their first baby. Although her parents aren’t really friendly, they are certainly united in their grief and Stephanie is kind and thoughtful. So, the adults in her life certainly prop Leo up. She also becomes closer to East, not in a romantic sense, but when the book opens we see that she is hanging with him and his friends and as the narrative unspools backwards we learn how much this relationship sustains them both.

We only ever see Nina through Leo’s eyes. She “always made sure that you knew her, that you knew what she was doing, where she was going, what she liked and hated. Nina wasn’t shy about any of that, about being herself.” She was someone Leo greatly admired and depended on. She was her favourite person, the “compass in our family, the rudder, the North star.”

I loved Benway’s novel Far From the Tree (I didn’t write a review of that book, but I talked about it here). I also found this book well written and thoughtful, but just a bit slow. The final few pages of the book were very effective though.