Sisters...sisters...they were never really skinny blisters... (my Dad used to sing this to me and my Sister to the tune of the Irving Berlin song - this is obviously the "not-for-radio" release).
Title: Sister
Genre: Crime Fiction (ish)
Author: Rosamund Lupton
Published: 2012
This book came to me in a little pile that my Mum-out-Law gave me. They were surplus novels from her work's reading shelf (they have a one-shelf limit!!). To be honest, this book went unloved and unnoticed for months because of the company it was keeping (Mills & Boon do not a goodread make!). Anyway, I ran out of books to read a week before payday so I turned to it in desperation fully expecting a sickly, pink-filled, cream puff of yuckiness.
Oh how very wrong I was...
Sister follows the story of Bee, a busy executive in NY, One morning, she receives a call from her mum in England telling her that her sister is missing. Bee hotfoots it back to Blighty in a complete panic since Tess' disappearance is so out of character and, as we discover, she (Tess) is heavily pregnant.
When Tess' body is found in some park toilets with slit wrists, the Police close the case and treat it as suicide.
But Bee knows her sister and is adamant that there are other evils at work.
Everything is told from Bee's point of view, with the timeline flitting backwards and forwards between her giving her statement to a Police Officer and writing a letter to Tess, her sister, explaining how she came to discover that her presumed suicide was, in fact, murder.
It is a sort of "whodunnit" really; a pleasant surprise because I really wasn't expecting a murder mystery.
We start with a missing girl, then a body, then a motive, then the struggle of trying to get the police to believe that it is murder not suicide - all the way back to working out who the murderer is and how they did it.
I found the writing style was quite hard to stomach at first. I thought that the flowery vocabulary was complete overkill. I felt a bit like the author was trying to prove that they could write well, or something. However, once you get to know the characters a bit more, you realise that the language is totally suited to the older sister's accidentally condescending personality. In the end, the vernacular chosen by the writer for Bee, the main character, served to enrich my experience of her. Once you are accustomed to the many layers of Bee's character and her gradual blending into Tess', you begin to see just how many dimensions there are to her character. The many layers of emotion that Lupton adds to her protagonist forces you to put yourself in her situation. In this way, you discover how love can control, change, destroy and heal.
Warning: You will probably cry and, if you have a sister it will be almost unbearable (but totally worth it).
All-in-all, "Sister" is an excruciating, tear-jerking, interesting and satisfying read. I would thoroughly recommend it.
It is a sort of "whodunnit" really; a pleasant surprise because I really wasn't expecting a murder mystery.
We start with a missing girl, then a body, then a motive, then the struggle of trying to get the police to believe that it is murder not suicide - all the way back to working out who the murderer is and how they did it.
I found the writing style was quite hard to stomach at first. I thought that the flowery vocabulary was complete overkill. I felt a bit like the author was trying to prove that they could write well, or something. However, once you get to know the characters a bit more, you realise that the language is totally suited to the older sister's accidentally condescending personality. In the end, the vernacular chosen by the writer for Bee, the main character, served to enrich my experience of her. Once you are accustomed to the many layers of Bee's character and her gradual blending into Tess', you begin to see just how many dimensions there are to her character. The many layers of emotion that Lupton adds to her protagonist forces you to put yourself in her situation. In this way, you discover how love can control, change, destroy and heal.
Warning: You will probably cry and, if you have a sister it will be almost unbearable (but totally worth it).
All-in-all, "Sister" is an excruciating, tear-jerking, interesting and satisfying read. I would thoroughly recommend it.
Keep bookwormin'!
Becky
