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| ★★✰✰✰ |
Synopsis: Nothing can break the bond between sisters ...When Beatrice gets a frantic call in the middle of Sunday lunch to say that her younger sister, Tess, is missing, she boards the first flight home to London. But as she learns about the circumstances surrounding her sister's disappearance, she is stunned to discover how little she actually knows of her sister's life - and unprepared for the terrifying truths she must now face.The police, Beatrice's fiance and even their mother accept they have lost Tess but Beatrice refuses to give up on her. So she embarks on a dangerous journey to discover the truth, no matter the cost.
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Review: Oh god, this book. It took me days to get through this book. I've read another of Lupton's books recently - The Quality of Silence, which, apart from the ending, I largely really liked. I decided to try another of her books based on the writing, and the writing in Sister was similarly great, for the most part. But this book and I did not get off on the right foot at all - it is told from the first-person perspective of one of the sisters, directed to the other, and recollects the present event of recollecting past events to pair of police officers, to another police officer. Confused? Me too. I kept losing track of whether stuff was happening in the past or present, and as such most of my early reading experience was focused on trying to keep track of when things were happening, rather than immersing myself in what should have been all of the feels.
Eventually I got the hang of what was going on - and to be fair to the book, my mojo was massively disrupted by having a social life over the weekend, so I really wasn't giving this book enough attention -and I became fairly interested in finding out what had happened to Bee's sister. But it was so tiring to listen to her endlessly suspect everyone, endlessly follow a fixed schedule (Tuesday I will... it was Tuesday, so I went... Arranged for Thursday... it was Thursday, so I went). Nothing seemed to happen organically. This impeded my desire to find out what happened, but now I was only like 100 pages from the end and the writing is very beautiful in places, so I kept going.
And suddenly! .....Redemeption for this dull slog of a read? Really? Is the author really going to do this?! This would be amazing! What an awesome.... oh, no. No. She really didn't. She set up the absolute perfect ending, with a superbly executed twist that I should have seen coming, but didn't. But no. She then undid all the impact of the twist with the final ending, and had the book not been on my tablet, I might have flung it across the room in a temper.
So much potential, so little satisfaction. I should probably give it three, but I'm giving it 2 for taking away that brilliant ending. After two books with underwhelming endings, I think I might be done with Lupton. Sorry Lupton! Just not for me.
Rating: 2/5
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