Guest Post - Sue Fortin shares her Inspiration for Sister, Sister - Blog Tour

I’m quite often asked about the inspiration behind a book and where I get my ideas from. I enjoy writing about the relationships people have with each other and find the dynamics of family and friendship groups fascinating. For Sister, Sister, I wanted to explore the impact of a family reunited in adulthood after being estranged for a considerable period of time, in this case, for twenty years. 

I have a very good relationship with my own sister, despite living over a hundred miles apart, but I’ve sometimes wondered if our relationship would be different if we lived closer or, indeed, in each other’s pockets. Would we see a lot of each other or would we get on each other’s nerves? With Sister, Sister, I took this idea to the extreme and had my two sisters, Clare and Alice, separated when they were young children and then, as adults, having to get to know each other all over again. Do they automatically love each other or do they just love the memory of one another? Do they even like each other? Sometimes you don’t like your family but you always love them because of the deep bond you share, but if you haven’t got that bond in the first place, what happens if you don’t like them? It was these sorts of questions that helped me develop the relationship between Clare and Alice as reunited adults.

However, this wasn’t the first idea for writing the book. I was having a conversation with a friend and although I can’t say exactly what the conversation was about as it would give away an important revelation in the book, it did spark the beginnings of an idea. From this I was able to play out a scene in my mind which then led to more questions.

Why would someone do that?

Who would do that?

What was their motive?

By answering those three questions I was able to develop the initial scene into something more solid and blend it with my questions about sisters and their relationship with each other. It was from there that the whole story of Sister, Sister developed.

So, for me, inspiration is a fluid and organic process. By asking a few questions it takes on a life of its own, pulling together constructed questions and random every day exchanges. Sometimes the most unremarkable conversations can suddenly become the starting block for a much more remarkable story.

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Thank you for sharing your inspiration for Sister, Sister with us all.

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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.