Wednesday 18 January 2017

Book Review - Sister Sister by Sue Fortin

Amazon UK
Title: Sister Sister
Author: Sue Fortin
Format reviewed: Ebook
Source: Netgalley
Publisher: Harper Impulse
Publication Date: 6th January 2017
Rating: 5 Stars


Alice: Beautiful, kind, manipulative, liar.

Claire: Intelligent, loyal, paranoid, jealous.

Claire thinks Alice is a manipulative liar who is trying to steal her life.
Alice thinks Claire is jealous of her long-lost return and place in their family.

One of them is telling the truth. The other is a maniac.
Two sisters. One truth.

I'm sitting here gobsmacked at what occurred in Sister Sister. It starts as a rather nice story, about a family who have always been splintered, and developed into a far more sinister storyline, complete with betrayal and secrets. 

Claire and Alice had been separated as young children, when their father took Alice on a long holiday to America and never came back, splitting the family. As Claire grew up and became a solicitor she was able to afford to high private detectives, but they never found Alice. Suddenly this year though, Alice makes contact with her mum, and shortly afterwards she is back in the family house, and everyone is making up for lost time trying to reconnect. 

However Claire can't really feel much for Alice, and despite being happy her sister is home, also suspects something is fishy, but the way everything is presented, the rest of her family think she is going mad. 

The question I had to ask was whether I was reading a story with an unreliable narrator, or was everything that I was seeing true fact, and that Alice was the one making things up.  There were points during the story where both of these possibilities seemed equally true, all the while I was gripped by what has occurring and had to keep reading to find out, just how the events in the first chapter really came about. 

 At points during the book I genuinely did feel that Claire may be on the brink of a breakdown, but at the same time everything she was saying seemed quite believable. Other times, I was curious to know more about the sister that had returned. I also quite liked Claire's husband Luke and his reactions to the circumstance seemed initially logical but then he seemed quite keen to believe his wife was not quite coping, while seemingly getting closer to the other sister. 

The whole story developed until it was caught up in a thrilling finale, where I really couldn't have predicted the final outcome. maybe I am just too trusting of facts at face value! There is a lot of action in this book, and I think the story definitely got under my skin a bit. It definitely had me thinking how I would feel if a sister returned after such a long absence. 

There are many revelations in the book, and most of them seemed quite unexpected when I first read them, but thinking back afterwards they are the sorts that make a lot of sense, what you think them through, and I was wondering why I hadn't thought like that myself. 

Sister Sister, is a another top quality story from Sue Fortin, an author who is becoming reliable for producing books with lots of drama, suspense, relatable to characters and a romantic element to them too. 

Thank you so much to Netgalley and Harper Impulse for this copy of the book which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily. 

1 comment:

  1. I was disappointed that simple things, such as the time difference between the UK and US, were wrong. And didn't Clare find the posh paper with the UK mobile phone number on it at Alice's house in the US.... but Martha didn't meet Tom until she came to the UK. That didn't make much sense to me. Other than that I really enjiyed it

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