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Birth order is a bitch. Your older sib has always been there before you. In the case of The Almost Archer Sisters, older sister Beth did adolescence so outrageously that little sister Peachy couldn't dream of visiting more pain on their loving father. Beth casts a shadow so dense that, a decade into adult life, Peachy is still groping around trying to find herself. The three days when she finally sees the light are the subject of Toronto writer and TV producer Lisa Gabriele's fine new comic novel, her second.

To say that Peachy is in Beth's shadow is not to say that she emulates Beth. Rather, she lives on Beth's discards – she even married Beth's high-school sweetheart. She's a stay-at-home mom who got knocked up at 20. While Beth is living the dream in Manhattan, Peachy is sorting socks in a Belle River laundromat and looking after two little boys, one of whom she calls “brain-stormy” for his uncontrolled seizures. And she's handling all of it gamely – until the day she catches her husband Beau having sex with her sister in the walk-in pantry.

The Almost Archer Sisters, by Lisa Gabriele, Anchor Canada, 272 pages, $19.95

I probably wouldn't let this plot point slip, except that the publishers reveal it in the promotional copy. How Peachy reacts is the set-up for the novel. Far from throwing her sister out of the house, Peachy decides to leave her there, in charge of the laundry and cooking and a little boy's seizures, a three-day sentence in real life designed to jog her out of herself. As for Peachy, she takes off for a weekend of shopping and dining and pampering in New York, including a blind date with the man Beth loves.

The set-up is Wife Swap, as in the British reality TV show, and in less-accomplished hands it might have felt contrived. But one of the first things to admire about this smart and funny novel is how deftly and convincingly Lisa Gabriele accomplishes the switch. And it's a great fictional premise. The two sisters are as crazily different as any two players in Wife Swap. They also have a lifetime of history with each other, which deepens and complicates everything.

Three days in Manhattan give Peachy a chance to catch her breath and to look at her life and the role Beth played in it. She has to do some hard thinking about why she married Beau in the first place, and why she has let their closeness slip away. The pacing in the first half of the novel is extraordinarily good: Just when you think you have the whole picture, Gabriele widens the frame, taking you further into the past of the two sisters and into their psyches.

“ As a narrator Peachy is, well, a peach – candid, irreverent, self-deprecating and witty ”

Gorgeous, clever, stylish and audacious, Beth has a way of making everyone around her “complicit in her crimes and dramas.” She's both needier than Peachy and more accomplished, gifted at playing every scene for sympathy or admiration, whatever's on tap. Nothing is sacred to Beth, not their mother's suicide, not their father's selling off farmland to pay for her college, not other people's feelings or the truth. Anything can be appropriated for the all-consuming project of enhancing Beth's image.

So it's not hard to understand why she did the dirty with Beau. But Beau, who is considered “the nicest guy in town” and who has come to detest his old girlfriend – what about him? When Peachy catches them at it, he's behind Beth, “the default position, I suppose, of people who can't bear to look each other in the eye.” He has had too much to drink, apparently, and he has been neglected by his wife … explanations I found a little insulting to nice guys everywhere.

Peachy's three days of Sex and the City living in Beth's condo provide her with further evidence of Beth's shallowness, desperation and lies, something readers will have grasped early on. At times, I wanted Peachy to be more a character in the moment, rather less the voice-over narrator. Sometimes she labours to explain herself: “An imaginary lover gave me the sense of being beautifully unworthy of my family, even just for a moment. It became a way of breaking free from the people I loved so desperately that leaving them in my mind was my only respite from this exhausting vigilance.”

But I don't want to give these complaints more space than they deserve. Over all, as a narrator Peachy is, well, a peach – candid, irreverent, self-deprecating and witty. “Her legs [were] so thin she could register them as a font,” she says of Beth. Some of her responses are miracles of character revelation and understatement. “‘Alrighty then,'” she says as she closes the door of the walk-in pantry on that fateful night.

The humour in The Almost Archer Sisters is broader than it is in Lisa Gabriele's lovely coming-of-age novel, Tempting Faith DiNapoli (2003). But the wisecracking Peachy can do tenderness too, and her love for her little boys is visceral. Consider this simple and lovely passage when one of the boys crawls into bed with Beau and Peachy in the night: “[Beau] put a heavy hand on my stacked knees and we fell into an untroubled sleep. In the morning Jake lay between us like something perfect we had made in the night.”

Every women I know seems to have a Beth in her life – sort of like Zenia, in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride. But how much more painful to extract yourself when you've spent a motherless childhood together. In the end, Peachy returns to Belle River with a new loyalty to herself: No more acting as the safety net for a self-destructive acrobat (that image is the author's). The story of how she got to that place of sad certainty is wise and true, a real delight.

Joan Thomas is a Winnipeg writer and reviewer, author of the novel Reading by Lightning