Reviews for The Sister

The average rating for The Sister based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-03-17 00:00:00 jeff tierno I wasn't sure what to make of this book and it didn't seem to know what to make of itself because the author deliberately leaves most of the loose ends loose. It has many elements which should add up to something; an unreliable narrator, a crumbling isolated mansion in the English countryside, a dysfunctional family, two ageing sisters, a forty year old rift, a touch of madness, surrogacy, lethal lepidopterists, lots of elements that would make a reasonable gothic tale. Somehow the elements do not quite come together. It is the story of two sisters; Virginia lives alone in the crumbling family mansion and has not seen her sister Vivien for about forty years. Suddenly Vivien announces she is returning to retire. It is set over a single weekend and mostly in flashback form. How much of the story we are told is true is not possible to establish as it becomes clear that Vivien is not an entirely reliable narrator. There is an awful lot about moths in this book; I wasn't aware that the study of lepidoptera means spending large amounts of time catching and slaughtering the poor little things. I really did not want to know how to remove the innards of a caterpillar so the skin is intact. Did you know that when the caterpillar pupates the contents turn into a liquid called pupal soup? Neither did I. It reads easily and draws you in, but is ultimately unsatisfactory. And just to be picky, representatives of social services, even volunteers, don't cold call on a Sunday.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-09-11 00:00:00 Reginald Lucas so while "the sister is powered by the same sort of confidently rendered literary suspense that propelled donna tartts the secret history onto bestseller lists (nyt)" is not quite the same thing as "books claiming to be just like secret history", it stays on the shelf. because no one can stop me. and the author photo shows the same kind of serious angular beauty as donna tartt, so- similarity. this book is full of things i like - the big crumbling mansion of the traditional gothic, the unreliable narrator of patrick mcgrath, the family secrets of kate atkinson, and now all im doing is name-dropping. i thought it was good. there are a few flaws that are just simply flaws a lot of first novels suffer from - the tendency to overdescribe certain things the reader is not interested in at the expense of some really interesting bits that remain a mystery. of course, a lot of this could be deliberate because of this particular narrators emotional shortcomings. i thought it did a good job of entering the head of this narrator (as i tiptoe around trying to avoid spoilers) and you will certainly learn a lot about moths. seriously - you might become an expert. but at the end, there are still some seriously unturned stones. which the more i think about it, might not be a criticism at all. by the way - i swear this is my last donna tartt-esque book for a long time - i just wanted to get through the lot of them and be done with it, finally. they had been piling up. i also need to get a move on my byronathan...