RMC Book Club

Korede’s sister Ayoola is many things: the favorite child, the beautiful one, possibly sociopathic. And now Ayoola’s third boyfriend in a row is dead, stabbed through the heart with Ayoola’s knife.

Korede’s practicality is the sisters’ saving grace. She knows the best solutions for cleaning blood (bleach, bleach, and more bleach), the best way to move a body (wrap it in sheets like a mummy), and she keeps Ayoola from posting pictures to Instagram when she should be mourning her “missing” boyfriend. Not that she gets any credit.

Korede has long been in love with a kind, handsome doctor at the hospital where she works. She dreams of the day when he will realize that she’s exactly what he needs. But when he asks Korede for Ayoola’s phone number, she must reckon with what her sister has become and how far she’s willing to go to protect her.

The RMC Book Club read My Sister, The Serial Killer during the fall 2023 semester. The discussion questions that guided our conversation are below.

1. Why does Ayoola kill?
2. Why does Korede help her cover it up?
3. What do you think the knife symbolizes?
4. Korede makes a point that she is not beautiful and Ayoola is. As a result Korede sees Ayoola as privileged. Do you agree that Ayoola is privileged and Korede isn't? What is the book saying about beauty? 
5. Ayoola kills her boyfriends. Ayoola and Korede’s father was abusive to them and to their mother. Muhtar’s wife wants to divorce him shortly after he wakes from a coma. Is there a happy relationship/marriage in the book? What does that say about love/marriage?
6. Can we make a parallels between Ayoola+Korede their father+aunt? The father committed evil, but the aunt enabled it. Is their morality (or lack of morality) inherited?
7. What do you make of Korede’s friendship with Muhtar? Why doesn’t Muhtar rat on her?
8. Tade tells Korede that she is worse than Ayoola. How/why is Korede worse? Do you agree with Tade? 
9. Lagos is portrayed as a corrupt place - cops accepting bribes, the father trying to sell off his daughter for political gain, etc. How does the large scale corruption of the city affect the personal lives of the characters? Are the characters corrupt like the city? Because of the city? Vice versa?
10. Talk about the menace and corruption that permeates Lagos, as well as the daily humiliations or sense of entitlement to which its residents are subjected.
11. What was your overall experience reading My Sister, the Serial Killer? The book is considered by most critics/reviewers as "darkly humorous." Do you find it funny; if so, where do you find the humor?
12. Some of these questions were adapted/borrowed from Lit Lovers: https://www.litlovers.com/reading-guides/fiction/11426-my-sister-serial-killer-braithwaite?start=3