Tag: books

#BlogTour #BookReview Sister of Mine by Laurie Petrou @VERVE_Books

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Welcome to today’s stop on the blog tour for Sister of Mine by Laurie Petrou. My thanks to Hollie at Verve Books for inviting me to take part in the tour and for my digital review copy. Hop over to Instragram and check out the post by my tour buddy for today, Johanna at memydogandbooks.

Sister of MineAbout the Book

Two sisters. One fire. A secret that won’t burn out.

The Grayson sisters are trouble. Everyone in their small town knows it. But no-one can know of the secret that binds them together.

Hattie is the light. Penny is the darkness. Together, they have balance.

But one night the balance is toppled. A match is struck. A fire is started. A cruel husband is killed. The potential for a new life flickers in the fire’s embers, but resentment, guilt, and jealousy suffocate like smoke.

Their lives have been engulfed in flames – will they ever be able to put them out?

Format: eARC (256 pages)               Publisher: Verve Books
Publication date: 29th May 2023 Genre: Mystery

Find Sister of Mine on Goodreads

Purchase links
Bookshop.org
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Hive | Amazon UK
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My Review

Sister of Mine has a simmering air of menace and a feeling of impending disaster that slowly builds in a really satisfying and suspenseful way. Throughout the book you get a sense there’s a reckoning coming. And it does.

The story is narrated entirely from Penny’s point of view so the reader never knows how accurate is her representation of her sister Hattie’s character. At one point Hattie says to Penny, ‘Do you think you know what it’s like? You think you know how it feels to be me?’ In fact, Penny’s attitude to her sister is fluid and often contradictory. ‘I love her, I loved her, I hate her, I hated her.’ They have a sisterly bond but one infused with shared secrets, recriminations, feelings of guilt and jealousy.  Being ‘adult orphans’, Penny as the elder sister regards Hattie as her responsibility but also as her ‘burden’. Penny presents Hattie as wayward, mercurial, rebellious but also someone who is attractive to others in a way Penny feels she is not. Indeed, Penny feels ‘tainted’ by the family’s past history and her response is often to seek a means of escape.

The blurb says ‘Hattie is the light. Penny is the darkness’ but it’s way more complex than that. They’ve both done things for which they blame themselves – and each other. As Penny observes, ‘We were bound now, twisted together in a braid of badness, neither side so different from the other anymore.’ But they have also each done things for the other, some of which are life-changing. The true nature of the bond between them is only revealed at the end of the book at which point much that went before becomes easier to comprehend and you may find your view of each sister – perhaps both sisters – changes.

Sister of Mine is a slow burn of a book (if you’ll pardon the pun) which has an element of mystery and some skilful misdirections. At its core, though, is a deft, perceptive and completely compelling exploration of sibling relationships.

In three words: Intense, brooding, insightful

Try something similar: Birthright by Charles Lambert

Laurie PetrouAbout the Author

Laurie Petrou is an award-winning, internationally published author. She is also an Associate Professor at the RTA School of Media at Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson). She has a PhD and Master’s in Communication and Culture (York and Toronto Met), a diploma in New Media Design (Sheridan), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts, specializing in painting (Queen’s). She lives in Niagara. (Photo: Author website)

Connect with Laurie
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

#WWWWednesday – 31st May 2023

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WWWWednesdays

Hosted by Taking on a World of Words, this meme is all about the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

Why not join in too?  Leave a comment with your link at Taking on a World of Words and then go blog hopping!

Currently reading

Hokey PokeyHokey Pokey by Kate Mascarenhas (eARC, Apollo via NetGalley) 

February, 1929. The Regent Hotel in Birmingham is a place of deception and glamour. Behind its six-storeyed façade, guests sip absinthe cocktails on velvet banquettes, while the hotel’s red-jacketed staff scurry through its lavish corridors to ensure the finest service is always at hand.

In the early evening, a psychoanalyst checks in under a pseudonym: Nora Dickinson. Nora is young, diligent and ambitious. Though she doesn’t see herself as a liar, she is travelling with an agenda. Having followed the famous opera singer, Berenice Oxbow, from Zurich to Birmingham, she’s determined not to let her out of her sight.

But when a terrible snow storm isolates the hotel – and its guests – from the outside world, the lines between nightmare and reality begin to blur…

AncestryAncestry : A Novel by Simon Mawer (Little, Brown) Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

The past is another country and we are all its exiles. Banished forever, we look back in fascination and wonder at this mysterious land. Who were the people who populated it?

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea… Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, sits primly in a second class carriage on the train from Sussex to London and imagines a new life in the big city… George, a private soldier of the 50th Regiment of Foot, marries his Irish bride, Annie, in the cathedral in Manchester and together they face married life under arms. Now these people exist only in the bare bones of registers and census lists but they were once real enough. They lived, loved, felt joy and fear, and ultimately died. But who were they? And what indissoluble thread binds them together?

Simon Mawer’s compelling and original novel puts flesh on our ancestors’ bones to bring them to life and give them voice. He has created stories that are gripping and heart-breaking, from the squalor and vitality of Dickensian London to the excitement of seafaring in the last days of sail and the horror of the trenches of the Crimea. There is birth and death; there is love, both open and legal but also hidden and illicit. Yet the thread that connects these disparate figures is something that they cannot have known – the unbreakable bond of family.

Recently finished

The Scarlet Papers by Matthew Richardson (Michael Joseph ) 

Sister of Mine by Laurie Petrou (Verve Books) 

What Cathy (will) Read Next

The Geometer LobachevskyThe Geometer Lobachevsky by Adrian Duncan (Tuskar Rock) Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023

‘When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology …’

It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands, where he studies the locals, the land and their ways. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a ‘special appointment’.

Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again.