Review : The Sisters by Claire Douglas

Published by : Harper Collins

13 August 2015

Copy : Paperback - Reviewer purchased

The Blurb

One lied. One died.

When one sister dies, the other must go to desperate lengths to survive. Haunted by her twin sister's death, Abi is making a fresh start in Bath. But when she meets twins Bea and Ben, she is quickly drawn into their privileged and unsettling circle.

When one sister lies, she must protect her secret at all costs. As Abi tries to keep up with the demands of her fickle friends, strange things start to happen - precious letters go missing and threatening messages are left in her room. Is this the work of the beautiful and capricious Bea? Or is Abi willing to go to any lengths to get attention? When the truth outs, will either sister survive?

The Very Pink Notebook Review

I found mixed reviews of The Sisters before reading it so I was interested to see which side of the fence I would fall on, but I have to say it is the positive one.  I flew through this book in two days.  I just could not put it down.

The plot is two-fold, following the lives of two sets of twins (Abi and Lucy, Bea and Ben) who have both experienced tragedy.  When their lives become entangled the plot gets thicker and thicker and with all the main narrators being hugely unreliable it makes you question everything.  I did sort of work out what the big secret was the characters Bea and Ben were trying to keep hidden, but that didn't take away from my enjoyment of the story because I couldn't really work anything else out and had no clue how it was all going to come together at the end.

I wouldn't say any of the characters were particularly likeable, I found them all very selfish and quite shallow, but for me, that worked well.  I didn't see that as a sign of poorly thought out characters, it just made me more wary of them which fed into the psychological thriller element.  I thought they were all capable of being the culprit of the disturbing incidences and all equally of being the victim.

There is a lot going on in this plot, and maybe it could have been scaled back a little as by the end you realise some parts are absolutely as they are laid out right at the start and therefore didn't really need investigating.  Also, sometimes I felt a few of the things that happened were a little too convenient (for example how the two main characters meet).  Having said that, no, it might not happen in real life, but this isn't real life, it is fiction and for the story to work sometimes you need to get over those issues, just read and enjoy as the plot unfolds.

I actually thought the ending for Bea and Ben was the obvious one for them and for Abi it was really good and true to her character, it remained indicative of the trauma she had experienced.

Overall I thought this was a pacey, exciting, well thought out psychological thriller that left no character in the clear.

The Sisters receives a Very Pink Notebook rating of :