Happy Thanksgiving, lovelies! Boy, do I have a lot to be thankful for this year (and every year). My life has been saturated by far too many blessings to count. Family and friends. Warm homes and warm hearts abounding. This crisp, read-leafed season. And of course, heaping plates of cranberry sauce, green bean casserole and pie!I’m sure you all have busy holidays planned, so I’ll narrow this profession of thankfulness to an item at the top of my list. My sisters.I weave sisterhood into nearly every story I write. I don’t do it on purpose. In fact, I didn’t realize I was doing it at all until recently, and I have no plans to stop. I’m the middle sister of three, and I wouldn’t trade my tribe for anything. My sisters have shaped me, carried me through my darkest places. Brightened my day-to-day, my year-to-year. Enriched me intellectually, emotionally, and empathetically, beyond measure. So it comes as no surprise that they’ve left their stamp on my creative endeavors, too.For me, A Wild and Unremarkable Thinghas, as its heart, always been a story about three sisters who’d do anything - even the very worst, most unimaginably terrible things - to help one another.I knew, in the midst of drafting, in the midst of edits, in the midst of endless read-throughs with my editor, that most people wouldn’t see the story this way. Sisterhood is not the big, obvious theme, and that’s okay. That’s wonderful, in fact - to hear that AWAUThas served different purposes for different people, that it’s carried myriad meanings among its early-readers…that was my big hope for this project. Incredibly, and in ways I’m still dumbfounded by, that hope is being realized again and again as early reviews trickle in.But that element of sisterhood, that intimate, familial bond, that’s what drove me emotionally through one draft and then the next, just as it drove Hayden and Emilia into the brothels and Cody into the Summer Alps. For me, above all else, these three, astoundingly resilient young women will always carry A Wild and Unremarkable Thingon their shoulders.Sisters are people who see you clearly. Who love you dearly. Who love you in spite of your flaws. Who understand how those flaws have improved you. Who tailor their emotional support, their advice, to best serve that beautifully-flawed person who is and always will be uniquely YOU.So this Thanksgiving, I thank the universe for my sisters, and for a mother who raised us to put one another on pedestals. To reach for one another when one of us stumbles. To check on one another.  To worry, to laugh, and to always, always lift each other up. To stand hip to hip, arms linked, and take on this world together.Happy turkey-day, readers. (And by the way, I’m thankful for you, too!)-J“The words they utter are too pretty for Ithil. The girls take no comfort in them, but for each other, they pretend.One does not believe the other, so well-washed are they by their galling lots in life.Their smiles are wizened and grim.That is the love of three suffering sisters: the pretending.Be brave, Cody says, but she does not say it out loud. Be brave a little bit longer, and I will make everything right.”-Jen Castleberry, A Wild and Unremarkable Thing