_lia_reads_'s Reviews (757)

DNF’d at 50%

Honestly, I thought about putting this one down earlier but I wanted to give it a bit more of a chance. I think this is a case of a book just not being for me. 

At the beginning of the book, I was struck by how similar the format is to Daisy Jones and the Six, and how similar the premise is to The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. I was really hoping for a unique story from there. However, I never felt like I connected with any of the characters, which was disappointing. I think this is all due to the format, which gives you very little insight into the characters besides what they say. To do this format well, your dialogue needs to be excellent. But there was not enough to distinguish between all the characters. The format also made it hard to keep track of the secondary characters. Many of these secondary characters felt like caricatures rather than real people.  

I appreciate what the author was trying to do here, but once I got to the “main event” that everyone was leading up to for the first half of the book, I honestly wasn’t invested and did not care what was going to happen in the second half. 

I really wanted to love this book. But I feel like this is one of those instances where a short book didn’t include enough to fully flesh out the story. I loved the base story of the 3 sisters who were torn apart by the death of the eldest 4th sister. Each one mourns the loss in a different way: one by never leaving the house and losing herself in writing; one by communicating with animals; and one by emulating her older sister. 

One year after their sister’s death, strange things start to happen in the house. This is where the story also takes a strange turn and becomes a ghost story. It was interesting to take a traditional story of grief in this way but it also took away from the sisters. 

In general, I wanted to spend more time with each sister and learn about their lives but with 3 POVs and a book under 300 pages, you don’t get a lot of time spent with any of the characters. 

Reading the author’s note at the end, with all of her sources of inspiration, made me appreciate what she tried to do with this story. However, I think it needed a bit more in its execution. 

TW: abusive relationship; death of a child; alcoholism