The Storm Sister, second in the Seven Sisters series (try saying that after a few drinks!) follows the same pattern as the first and I imagine the others, too. After the death of their billionaire father his adoptive daughters are given clues to their heritage and learn about their back stories.
The series has been really well-received: The Storm Sister, which is the story of Allie, the second sister, has over 37,000 reviews and averages 4.6* on Amazon so it's clearly struck a rich vein of readers. I liked the first one, The Seven Sisters, very much indeed and already have book three lined up …but I find myself taking a slightly heretical view.
I love Lucinda Riley. Her stories are terrific. They typically feature young women from a variety of backgrounds but all supremely talented in at least one way; they encompass billionaire lifestyles, glamorous settings, romance, danger, tragedy… They have it all. The writing is page turning. The characters are real. You can escape so easily into a different world and resurface from it only when you’re ready. They are perfect holiday reads.
But they’re long books, 700 pages or so, and each tells two complete but separate stories. The Seven Sisters was so chunky it hurt my ageing wrists to hold it so I borrowed the second from the library on audiobook, and this led me to a shocking revelation. Because the book is so long, and because the loan is time-limited, there was no way I was going to get through 20 hours or more and finish it. So I started skipping. I effectively cut out the story of Allie’s great-grandparents and discovered that…the book worked as well, if not better, with a single story than with two.
The thing is, most of my interest in the first two books was in the present. It’s in the sisters’ relationships and their adventures as they try to unpick their own stories, the love and loss along the way. In The Storm Sister, which sees Allie rebuild her life after a tragedy that had me in tears even though I could sense it coming, I felt I didn’t need the full detail of the second story to make the first complete.
It’s actually a bit of a bargain, two books in one, and I feel a little bad for having skipped so much, but the truth is I didn’t feel I missed much by not reading/listening to the whole thing. I also have a slight concern that by the time we get to sister number six, the formula might have run its course.
I'm going to read the next in the series (The Shadow Sister) but, as I discovered it's even longer than this one, maybe I'll wait until I have very long period of dead time to occupy...
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