The Sisterhood by Emily Barr (The Sisterhood - Emily Barr)

Member Name: stephbond89

Product:	The Sisterhood - Emily Barr
Date:	29/09/09 (24 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazing storyline, fabulous characters. Heartbreaking story.

Disadvantages: None!

I haven't heard of Emily Barr before this book, and this is the first of her books which I have read, other books you may have heard of are:
BackPack
Baggage
Cuban Heels
Atlantic Shift
Plan B
and Out of my Depth
After reading this book, I will definitely be reading more books by Barr.

Plot:
Helen lives in Bordeaux, France, with her mother & father, who are rich wine makers, and also with her 15 yr old brother, Tom. Helen is 20, and fresh out of schooling. She has never really got on with her parents, well her mother inparticular, and feels they don't "love" her. Helen has gone so far as to move out into a small cottage on their vineyard, where she lives alone, with nobody but her brother for company- he is her best...and only friend. Helen is an outcast, she was never liked in school, and even in her family she feels an outcast.
She spends her days rummaging through her mothers cupboards looking for anything which may be of interest. And one day she finds just that. Her mothers little secret.

She and Tom have a sister, from their mothers previous marriage, they have never heard anything about this marriage or this woman, Elizabeth Greene, who is now 37. Elizabeth was born in Brighton, and Mary, her mother had left her with her father, and run away to go traveling, ending up in France, remarrying and living a lie.

Helen decides she must find her sister, and heads off to London, when she thinks she has found the woman who is to be her saviour.

Meanwhile back in London, Lizzie is a 37 year old woman, with her fair share of problems. Her boyfriend of 10 years has just left her for a fresh faced...boy...and now after a one night stand with a pre-op transexual, Rosa, finds herself alone, and pregnant. Making friends with Helen on a baby forum site, she feels she has someone to talk to, but when she turns up in her home town, Lizzie can't seem to shake her and her weird ways.

Helen's plan is to ruin Liz's life, make it so bad she has to come back to France with her and finally her family will be re-aquainted and everyone will love her again. She doesn't tell Liz who she is, and makes friends with her, and even ends up living with her.

But will she end up losing control of her life, will her plan go awry when Liz starts looking at her in that strange way? With twists and turns around every corner, the book really keeps you on your toes all the way from the first page through to the last page. And you will be guessing and guessing right up until the end and even then you won't know whats happening.

With alternating chapters from Helen and Liz's perspective with shorter interludes from Mary giving us insight into the past, we get 3 angles on the story.

OPINION:
Characters
Helen: Helen is very hard to work out, and get your head around. She is very strange, and doesn't seem to know how to act in the real world, which is maybe a result of been an outcast, but she ends up giving out the complete wrong impression of herself by trying to do right by everybody else.
As a reader we know that she is only trying to make people like her, that she wants Liz, Matt, her parents, everybody, like her, but by doing so, she is making herself look like a weirdo. We can feel her frustration when people don't like her and react how they do to her as she is so clueless that it's because of the things she does that they feel like that, and if she just acted like herself they would love her for her!

Elizabeth:
Liz seems pretty normal, her life is mad and crazy and it's easy to see why she gets so frustrated. We feel for her all the way through the book, everything seems to go wrong for her (little does she know that her so called friend Helen is at the end of most of the things bad in her life!). She is always making bad choices and decisions, but we know it's all going to work out for her in the end...don't we?!
She is a very believable character, and she can easily be perceived as a real person. ALl through the book we know things that Liz doesn't know, about Helen and about her past, and we just want to scream to her about what is happening. She is too trusting as a person and that get's her into alot of trouble.

I bought this book thinking it was a chick lit book, it seemed like it was going to be from the blurb, and I like a good chick lit to read before bed, but I was surprised to find the book is more like a drama. Unlike chick lits, the storyline is very deep, it doesn't have the typical conventions of a chick lit book (the comedy, romance side), and is infact quite deep.

The storyline could have been made very girly, and romancy. If it had the book would no way have been as interesting as it infact is. The storyline is very serious, and yuo feel it could have some cyncial and grizzly ending.

I adored the book, it made such a difference to the usual girly nonsense I read and although I love my chick lit, this made for a very pleasant change. The story isn't at all predictable, and as I said earlier, at every corner there is a new shock and surprise which we don't expect.

The story is very tragic really in everyway. Helen hax to put up with a familt who don't love her, and the story of Mary is heartbreaking all the way through, the fact she had these feelings about baby Elizabeth and nobody helped her through it, instead she had no choice but to run away and leave her child. The last few chapters of the book had me reaching for the tissues and sobbing into my pillow when everything comes together in a huge finale.
The ending definitely does the rest of the book justice and really has the shock factor, and the use of an epilogue is excellent.

If you like chick lit, but sometimes feel you want a little something extra, then this book is for you. At 342 pages long, it's the perfect length for bedtime reading or for your holidays!

Summary: A definite must read for everyone!